This past week, a group of serious Drupal developers assembled in Cambridge, MA to work on upgrading Drupal.org and infrastructure. This team includes Damien Tournoud, Derek Wright, Neil Drumm, David Strauss, Chad Phillips, Jeremy Andrews, Narayan Newton, Austin Smith, Moshe Weitzman, Dries Buytaert, Susan MacPhee and Gábor Hojtsy, and others helping through virtual channels. The team included performance experts, project module maintainers, an infrastructure manager and others. It was a great fit for our goals.

We worked hard, putting in 12-14 hour days, fleshing out solutions over breakfast, lunch and dinner, leaving a short time to sleep. We took on a big job: updating Drupal.org to Drupal 6, accomplishing as much as possible while in the same room. We managed to run test upgrades multiple times a day, integrating everyone’s work, testing interactions of new items as they became ready.

We ran the upgrade on the d6.drupal.org staging site so you can see and test as well. While we tried to make it work as it does in Drupal 5, you will notice some changes. The four most important changes are:

• We migrated to ApacheSolr for search. This will play a big role in the redesign implementation. We hope you enjoy the new faceted search features and help us find any kinks remaining here. The project browsing pages are now based on faceted search.
• Project issue queues are now based on Views. This changes some URLs, but gives us cool new exposed filters. Issue advanced search is now on the same page as the results, allowing you to drill down to the issues you care about.
• We replaced Simplenews with Mailman subscriptions, which we use for discussion lists. We developed a subscription interface under the user settings.
• We built a subversion repository for managing core, modules, themes, and deployments of all Drupal.org sites.

To properly test the upgrade, we set up a staging CVS repository, mail server, mailman lists and other components. Our upgraded code allows you to subscribe and unsubscribe on lists on our staging mailing lists. We welcome you to help test the site features, browse pages, search for projects, filter issue lists, submit and follow up on issues. All existing subscriptions were removed, so you will not receive email from the test site without testing it. Committing to staging CVS tests the related functionality; there is a snapshot of the cvs.drupal.org repository at cvs-new.drupal.org. To test this scratch CVS repository (committing, tagging, creating release nodes), you will need to set your CVSROOT to::pserver:cvs_username@cvs-new.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib

There are probably issues to be worked out, so please look at and test what you usually use. If you find a problem, check the list of known issues related to the drupal.org upgrade and see if it has already been reported. If not, you should report a new issue, and please tag it as "drupal.org upgrade" (expand the "Tags" fieldset when creating the issue and enter the tag name).

We still need more fundraising to continue working on the redesign, any contributions are appreciated. In addition to the many individual contributors who have donated money already, various companies have stepped up to donate human resources. Kudos go to One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), AF83, Four Kitchens, DrupalTherapy, OpenBand, Looforyoo, NowPublic, Tag1 Consulting and Acquia.

Drupal version: Drupal 5.xDrupal 6.x