In October 2005, we conducted a Drupal.org user survey to get feedback on the Drupal.org website and to prioritize the work we should put into improving it. We have since been working on the improvements that the respondents felt were most important. Today, we are pleased to roll out a number of these improvements. At the same time, we've upgraded Drupal.org to the latest CVS version.

So, in good Drupal tradition, we the developers get to eat our own dog food again, and you the users get to see and test these latest changes. Please let us know if you find anything out of whack - this has been a significant upgrade and we are still fine-tuning the site.

The key changes include:

1. Improved search. Using the 'advanced search'-tab you can restrict searches to specific Drupal versions, to specific forums, to the handbook pages, etc.
2. Project categorization. We've categorized all the contributed projects hosted at Drupal.org and made it possible to browse projects by category. This should allow you to narrow down your search for that perfect module, and see others in its class, without having to search through them alphabetically.
3. Project updates. We've made it possible to see when a project has been last updated. As a result, projects can be browsed by date. No one likes downloading code that has no maintainer or to which no lifeline exists - by glancing at the date you'll be able to eyeball it's heartbeat.
4. Forum reorganization. We've added, split apart, and reorganized some forums and mailing lists to better meet the growing demand of our users and their desires.
5. Dev Docs and CVS. You can now browse the Drupal API at http://api.drupal.org/. (to replace the old http://drupaldocs.org/). You'll also be able to change your Drupal.org CVS account from your user profile.

We are still working on a number of other improvements (eg. project ratings) which we should be able to roll out more easily now that Drupal.org runs on the latest CVS.

If you want to help maintain or improve the Drupal.org website, please join the infrastructure mailing list or work on some Drupal.org tasks.

The upgrade to Drupal.org has been a lot of work by various members of the community over the past several months. From testing of patches and upgrades to prioritizing which items would be worked on first and how it would be approached, user surveys, to determining which categories will be used in the download pages. Without people in our community willing to do the work necessary to turn the ideas into reality, it wouldn't have been posible.

Thanks to everyone involved.

Drupal version: Drupal 4.7.x