The redesign gets a boost
At the Drupal Association retreat in San Francisco, the general assembly set the completion of the drupal.org redesign as its number one priority for 2010. The assembly agreed to fund five contracts to help eliminate obstacles that had prevented the community from completing the redesign.
Five key roles were identified: Architect, Solr developer, Project module developer, and an infrastructure developer. The association also elected to upgrade Drupal.org code repository from CVS to Git to help maintain Drupal.org as the hub of Drupal development.
Hiring process:
Job descriptions were developed in conjunction with both the redesign volunteers and the Drupal.org project managers, Kieran Lal, Chris Strahl, and Lisa Rex. The job descriptions were then posted to groups.drupal.org for 3 weeks. Approximately 35 applications were received and a dozen interviews were conducted by the project management team. The contracts were negotiated with Drupal Association Interim General Manager Jacob Redding, to whom the project team reports directly. Contractors work day-to-day with the project management team. The association will pay for the contract work using the funds raised through memberships, advertising, partnerships, affiliates, and DrupalCon sponsorships.
The association project team:
Architect:
Neil Drumm: Neil Drumm is maintainer of the current drupal.org theme, blue beach. Neil also maintains and leads api.drupal.org and is a member of the drupal.org infrastructure team. Neil is also the Drupal 5 maintainer.
Responsibilities:
- Develop architecture road map including a list of approved modules
- Create implementation plans for each of the prototype pages
- Review all issues for the Blue Cheese theme, drupalorg module, and the drupal.org development infrastructure
- Ensure that integration of Project module, Solr search features, and Git migration will work together.
Solr developer:
Bill O’Connor, Achieve Internet: Achieve Internet sponsored the development of Solr search and project browsing components of the redesign. Bill has been active in this development since December 2009. Bill brings experience in advanced Solr development and Drupal scalability to this project.
Responsibilities:
- Develop custom search facets for the search results filters, and the download and extend pages
- Develop and deploy multi-site search across all *.drupal.org sites
- Extend search indexes to include project statistics and project meta-data
Project Module developer:
Derek Wright, Chad Phillips, Mike Prasuhn, 3281d: Derek and Chad have been developing the Project module for over five years and are the lead maintainers for the project module system on drupal.org. Derek and Chad have extensive expertise in revision control, automated software building and testing, and release management. Mike Prasuhn is also an active contributor to the Project module.
Responsibilities:
- Add project meta data to allow for advanced project browsing, ApacheSolr integration
- Project module migration from CVS to Git
Git migration lead:
Sam Boyer: Sam is the co-maintainer for the Panels module and maintains the Version Control API. Sam is an expert in version control systems and Drupal stack scalability. Sam wrote the original community road map to upgrade from CVS to Git.
Responsibilities:
- Develop a migration path for 8600 projects from CVS to Git
- Integrate the drupal.org project revision control interface with Git repositories
- Build out a QA, and testing process for the migration
Infrastructure developer:
Narayan Newton, Rudy Grigar, Tag1 consulting: Narayan and Rudy are former system administrators for Oregon State University Open Source Labs, where they managed much of the drupal.org infrastructure. Narayan is the lead system administrator for drupal.org.
Responsibilities:
- Enable community contributors to get access to the drupal.org theme, code base, and sanitized copies of drupal.org databases
- Creation of automated set-up, provisioning, and maintenance scripts with hudson to allow redesign infrastructure administrators to automate
- development, staging, and production tasks while preserving security
- Standardizing the drupal.org server infrastructure
What does this mean for the Drupal community?
The Association’s decision to offer paid contracts to contribute to the volunteer-led redesign was not taken lightly. After over a year's evaluation of 6 redesign sprints and 9 months of volunteer community development, the Association took the recommendations of the redesign project managers. The introduction of paid contractors introduces risks to this volunteer effort, but ultimately it was decided that removing the obstacles to the redesign completion was a higher priority. The association also felt these contracts are an effective use of the Association’s financial resources to support the Drupal project.
The Drupal community is still responsible for completing the redesign. We are looking forward to making it easier to contribute to improving drupal.org.
Getting started and sprinting
The redesign team has begun work as they have become available over the last four weeks. Today and tomorrow the redesign team is meeting in Portland, Oregon to co-ordinate their road maps, milestones, and time lines. If you are local to Portland or attending OSCON, you can meet the sprinters at the Drupal meet-up tomorrow night.
The redesign team sprint attendees include the paid contract team as well as the Association Interim General Manager Jacob Redding, project manager Chris Strahl, Dries Buytaert, and redesign lead Kieran Lal.
How to get involved
The best way to get involved in the redesign is to join the redesign implementers group. The project management team is prepared to help train you on how to contribute with the new BZR code, and redesign infrastructure. We are looking for themers, developers, content contributors, and testers. Contact us via the association contact form using the volunteer to help with drupal.org redesign category.