Overview of projects and issues

This page describes what "projects" and "issues" are, in the context of the Drupal project community. If you prefer, you can watch a video with with similar content.

See also the issue reporting section of the Community page.

What is a project?

The Drupal community as a whole is composed of a large number of "projects", which are basically working groups. The central project, "Drupal core", is dedicated to maintaining the Drupal core software. There are also software projects for each contributed module, theme, and distribution that you can download on Drupal.org.

Other projects are for working groups that are not connected to a particular piece of Drupal software. For example, there is a Documentation project, dedicated to writing and improving Drupal documentation, and another project dedicated to building and improving the Community section on the drupal.org web site.

Each project has a home page on drupal.org. Project home pages typically contain:

• A short description of the project
• A list of the project's leaders (known as "maintainers" on software projects)
• Download links if the project is associated with a piece of software
• Links to documentation for the project
• Issue queue (lists of issues -- see below, and read the rest of this documentation section for more on issues)

You can find project pages for software projects (Core, modules, themes, distributions) by starting from the Download & Extend page on drupal.org.

What is a project issue?

Drupal projects use issues to keep track of bugs, feature requests, tasks, and (depending on the project) possibly support requests. Each issue starts with someone in the Drupal community creating the issue report, and then other Drupal community members can comment, make suggestions on how to address the issue, discuss others' suggestions, and attach screenshots and patch files (patch files propose changes to the software).

How can I create an issue?

See Creating or updating an issue.

What is an issue queue?

An issue queue is the list of issues for a project; typically, only the open issues (the ones that have not yet been resolved).

How do I find an issue queue?

You can find links to the issue queue for each project on the sidebar of the project's home page (which may be at the bottom of the screen on a mobile device).

What modules provide project/issue functionality?

The Project module provides the ability to create projects in a Drupal site. The related Project issue tracking module provides the ability to create issues for projects.