The Drupal Association announced this week that Drupal.org will be migrating its developer tools to GitLab. In selecting a partner for modernizing the project’s tooling, the association aimed to preserve the most valuable parts of Drupal’s workflow. They also wanted a partner that would keep evolving its code collaboration feature-set.

For the past six months Drupal has been working closely with Eliran Mesika, the Director of Partnerships at GitLab, in addition to CEO Sid Sijbrandij and members of GitLab’s engineering team. They’ve escalated the internal priority of issues that blocked our adoption of GitLab, offered technical and financial support for the migration, and made a commitment to ongoing support for the Drupal project.

“By adding merge requests, contributing to Drupal will become much more familiar to the broad audience of open source contributors who learned their skills in the post-patch era,” Lehnen said. “By adding inline editing and web-based code review, it will be much easier to make quick contributions. This not only lowers the barrier to contribution for people new to our community, it also saves significant effort for our existing community members, as they’ll no longer need to clone work locally and generate patches.”

This may be something that WordPress benefits from also.  “It’s definitely something on our minds,” Mullenweg said when asked if GitLab and WordPress might collaborate in the future. “Core WordPress is still Trac and Subversion, so I think that it’s not our top priority this year, but in the future it’s definitely on the radar.”