Presenting the 2021 Open Source Giants

This year’s Acquia Engage Awards recognized the Doers, Builders and Dreamers within our network of customers and partners who are creating superlative customer experiences through radical innovation. It would be remiss if we did not mention the important role that open source and Drupal played for all of our Engage Awards finalists and winners. That is why, for the third year running, we are paying special tribute to our Open Source Giants. This award category recognizes the organizations giving back to Drupal, whether it be through Drupal.org or GitHub code contributions, event sponsorship, community mentorship or technical excellence.

As always, we are inspired by our winner and finalists and are excited to share their stories and projects here.

Palantir.net (Winner)

Palantir.net is one of the world’s leading contributors to the Drupal project and community, with team members including high profile core contributors and module maintainers, Drupal Association board members, conference organizers and community volunteers. 

Following the initial development of Drupal Rector in 2020, which focused on Drupal 9 readiness, Palantir.net has been working with Acquia’s Gabor Hojtsy to develop a plan to prepare the tool for Drupal 10’s release, anticipated for June 2022. While team members have continued to work on the Drupal 9 version of Drupal Rector, Palantir is also working to make sure both Drupal Rector and the Upgrade Status module are ready for Drupal 10. The goal is to make it easier for existing Drupal 8 and 9 users to migrate to Drupal 10 when it is released.

As of August 25, 2021, 95% of the 22,204 Drupal deprecated API uses identified in Drupal 9 compatible projects are already covered by Drupal Rector, ensuring that Drupal 10 readiness will be largely automated. 

Elevated Third (Finalist)

Working with enterprise B2B customers over the last decade, Elevated Third recognized a common need among their clients: a balance between flexibility and consistency. They need to be able to go to market quickly without a lot of technical help, but maintaining brand integrity, especially at a global scale, is equally important. To fill this need, Elevated Third created a Drupal distribution, Paragon, as a starting point for enterprise clients.

Leveraging Layout Builder, Paragon supports component blocks for drag-and-drop editing and standards revision control. Regions, paired with blocks, offer B2B marketing teams extensive customization while maintaining brand standards across the site. Paragon also offers media management capabilities, leveraging modern formats such as .webp and progressive resizing for faster performance at scale. Rather than making it an official install profile, Paragon is instead managed as a Composer template that heavily leverages the Core Composer Scaffold and includes exported configuration that can be used to install the site.

While Elevated Third uses Paragon as a foundation for every enterprise B2B site they build, it is fully open source and available on Drupal.org for other organizations to use, extend and improve upon. Using Paragon to power sites for brands like Trimble, Transamerica Finastra and Instructure, Elevated Third avoids recreating the wheel with each site build and instead uses their development time toward further customizations and enhancements.

Mediacurrent (Finalist)

Mediacurrent is a long-time contributor to open source with a nationally distributed team that strongly believes in open source principles, collaboration and the sharing of knowledge to strengthen the Drupal community. Mediacurrent has a company mission to support the open source community and is a training partner for the recently launched Discover Drupal program.

Drupal talent is in high demand. To help young professionals get started in a Drupal career, the Drupal Association offers Discover Drupal as a 12-month scholarship and training program for underrepresented individuals in the open source community. Mediacurrent was selected to conduct workshops for the Front-End Developer training pathway, with two levels of training: one for fundamentals of web development, with a focus on front end, and one on a deep dive into Drupal theming. Training sessions began in July and are held twice a week via Zoom for two hours each. The five students enrolled in the program participate in hands-on trainings with the opportunity to practice their coding skills and after each session, assignments are given for students to complete independently. In addition to the training and a number of scholarships provided to the program, Mediacurrent will be mentoring students and providing an opportunity for an internship after completion of the program.

At Acquia, one of our company values is Give Back More. We celebrate these like-minded organizations who have also created a culture of giving back and we thank them for their ongoing contributions to the open source and Drupal communities. 

See more innovative projects by other Engage Awards winners in our gallery.