ContribKanban Rebuilt to Track Drupal.org Issues and GitLab Work Items

Developer Matt Glaman has rebuilt ContribKanban, an issue-tracking tool for Drupal contributors, to display Drupal.org issues and GitLab work items together. The update addresses a problem created by the ongoing migration of contributed-project issues to GitLab, which left some boards displaying incomplete issue lists. Matt detailed the changes in a technical account published on 28 October 2026.

ContribKanban previously retrieved issues through Drupal.org's API, where issues are stored as nodes. When projects moved to GitLab, newly created work items were no longer available through that API. Boards tracking issues across several projects could therefore miss work from migrated projects. Older Drupal.org issues also remained accessible as read-only copies, with their statuses unchanged after migration.

The rebuilt application retrieves information from both systems and combines the results into shared boards. For migrated projects, it uses GitLab work items instead of outdated Drupal.org copies. GitLab labels are also used to organise work items into status columns, allowing contributors to follow issues across projects that use different tracking systems.

Matt also updated ContribKanban's issue collections, which allow contributors to assemble selected issues from multiple projects. Migrated issues retain their original Drupal.org identifiers, while work items created directly in GitLab use identifiers unique only within each project. To prevent conflicts between identical numbers belonging to different projects, ContribKanban now stores the GitLab project path alongside each work item identifier. Collections can therefore include Drupal core issues and GitLab work items from projects such as Tool API and MCP.

The Rosetta board demonstrates the updated tag-based tracking. It brings together labelled work from Tool API, Tool Belt, AI Context and the MCP server tool bridge. Related Drupal core issues can be tracked alongside GitLab work items through issue collections. This allows contributors working across these projects to follow related development activity without searching each issue system separately.

The update also changes ContribKanban's architecture. After several years as a decoupled application, Drupal now handles page rendering, user accounts, forms and access control, while React is retained for interactive features such as the issue board. The React interface is integrated through Drupal's Single Directory Components system, with Vite compiling its JavaScript directly into the component. Matt explained that fetching issues through each user's browser avoids placing all users behind a shared server-side GitLab API rate limit.

Other additions include an issue roulette feature developed by Fons Vandamme, which selects unassigned issues from eligible workflow states, and support for embedding filtered boards on external websites. Both features work with the updated tracking system. The changes allow contributors to organise work across Drupal.org and GitLab while the migration of project issue queues continues.