There's lots of exciting news about Groups.Drupal.org which was launched over three years ago as a

a glorious hub of worldwide drupal user groups.

Three years since and there are almost 650 groups on the site and over 51,000 subscriptions to those groups with over 700,000 page views each month. A glorious hub indeed.

Single sign on problems:

Many users will now enjoy the magic "single sign on" from bakery, but some accounts couldn't be fixed. If you have problems logging in to the site please follow the instructions on the account synch request form.

Upgrade to Drupal 6.x - New Maintainers, New Features

Along with the redesign and upgrade happening for drupal.org, Groups.Drupal.org is being upgraded. Moshe Weitzman is leading the charge on this effort. Moshe has decided that this upgrade makes a good point to pass along some maintenance responsibilities for the site to Josh Koenig and Greg Knaddison.

Moshe's original goals with the site were to create a next step beyond the forums where people could discuss more focused topics. It provided a test-bed for many modules and Moshe is thankful to the maintainers of those modules for their help over the years. You can find more about the modules used on the site and their maintainers on the site itself.

Josh Koenig got particularly involved with the site when he started the Drupal Dojo at the end of 2006.

Greg Knaddison grew involved with this site while it was first being built. The Denver/Boulder Group (which Greg helped found) is node number 20 on the site. Since then he has worked as a content moderator on the site.

New Features - Features Removed

In addition to "just upgrading to 6.x" Josh, Greg, and Moshe are working to add in new features. Major new features include group location tracking/search and enhanced search using Apache Solr. The new groups site will also integrate with the global drupal.org redesign, which will introduce a lot of powerful new features to the wider drupal universe. If you are interested in providing feedback for new features of the site or how it can work better, consider joining the Groups.drupal.org meta group and providing feedback there.

Thanks to the work of Carl Wiedeman we now have the ability to limit the number of groups that a post can go into based on the content type - no more jobs being posted to 50 groups!

And, thanks to David Strauss we have Bakery baking and eating up cookies so that you can have single sign on between drupal.org and groups.drupal.org. We automatically matched up accounts for as many people as we could, but if you have problems getting the single sign on to work please follow the instructions on the account synch request form.

Translations are not entirely updated - especially with the launch of localize.drupal.org we hope people will contribute translations for all the modules used on the site and then we can update them on the site.

By moving to Drupal 6 we get to leverage all sorts of additional features available in 6.x core and modules. Unfortunately, we also had to remove a few features along the way. A while ago we disabled the ability to use private content. Thanks to great effort by Josh Koenig and Matt Cheney, the ability to customize group home pages (which is provided by the Organic Groups Panels module) will work on the upgraded site. However, it's possible that in the upgrade to Views 2, Panels 3, and OG Panels for 6.x that some of the exact configurations may be lost. Josh created a thread at to track any regressions with OG Panels.

And if you notice any other problems, please leave them as a comment here, as a comment on groups.drupal.org upgrade thread or as an issue here on drupal.org.

Thanks to Our Ongoing Maintainer Team and Module Developers

There are many people who work to keep the site going all the time. In particular Peter Wolanin, Simon Roberts and Roy Scholten help moderate new group submissions.

Drupal version: Drupal 6.x