How to become a co-maintainer for an existing Drupal module

There's a lot of Drupal modules out there that need some love. It's a bit sad to be honest, it feels like zombie land. There's still a lot of awesome modules out there still supported and kicking ass, but a lot of them needs love.

There's a module I like, admin_tooltips that we use a lot at work, like 21 other people according to the stats. Across the years we piled up quite a few issues and merge requests that were left unattended, so this summer I decided I would try to become co-maintainer and see if I can change the fate of the module. So here's my story!

It all started with a message on the #contribute channel, on the Drupal slack (I highly recommend that you join!). I asked how I should proceed with my plan. Some people were thinking the open-source way, fork the project and resubmit under a new name. While I really like the idea of not having to wait and filling paperwork and just moving forward, fast, it will end up making the zombie land situation worst. Then a very nice person pointed me out to the official doc! That's lot of text that tries to be very thorough, which is great, but here's a quick rundown:

• Open a new ticket in the issue queue of module that you want to maintain.
• Use the following template for the title : Offering to maintain [PROJECT_NAME].
• Describe why you want to maintain the module (I'm using it at work. They are interested in sponsoring the development, for example).
• Look at the current maintainers profile of the module. They might have the Contact tab enabled, which sends them an e-mail.

You can basically copy-paste what you put into the issue queue at this point.

• The waiting game begins, any maintainers have 14 days to respond to the request. If they have abandoned the module, they are likely to never respond.
• Once the 14 days are done, you can move the issue into the Drupal.org project ownership in the project field.
• Make sure to add a link of the module page in the issue to facilitate the work of whoever is going to pick up the issue.
• Project moderators will likely try the contact tab again of all the existing maintainers, so the 14 days wait time restarts again.
• If you don't have any news after those new 14 days, leave a comment to show you're still interested.

So the whole process takes roughly a month. Keep in mind that the maintainer could also reply, refuse, or give you limited permissions. In my case I was given co-maintainer role, which is sadly not enough to publish a new release and update the module page.

Now I'm waiting for my permissions to be elevated, so I can make a proper release, add support for Drupal 10 and Drupal 11, add support for composer. Which basically means restarting the 30 days process... let's see how it goes!