What’s new on Drupal.org? - December 2015

Look at our Strategic Roadmap highlighting how this work falls into our priorities set by the Drupal Association Board.

The Drupal.org Engineering team finished out 2015 with some quick wins, some planning for the new year, and some time spent catching our breath. With the December holidays wrapped in as well, this will be a bit of a shorter update. But after a frenetic November supporting the Drupal 8 release, a quieter December was just what the team needed to close the book on the year.

The Drupal.org roadmap

Community elections coming up

Community elections for the Drupal Association board are coming up soon. Nominations will open in February and we want to do everything we can to improve the nomination and voting experience, and to improve turnout among the Drupal community. In December, we revisited our elections plans and your feedback from the last elections cycle, and prioritized some refinements and improvements.

Updates for organizations

We also took the time to add a quick win for organizations who support the Drupal ecosystem, whether those are organizations that contribute code, provide services, or hire Drupal developers. We've added path aliases for organization names, so that Drupal organizations have a friendlier way to link to their profiles—and show off everything they do to support our community!

Small fixes to spam tools

We also deployed a very minor, but very welcome, fix to our spam fighting tools that fixes a bug that prevented users from unflagging things they had reported as spam. We also have some larger changes coming in January that should have a big impact on the ability of spammers to get through to the site in the first place.

Sustaining support and maintenance

DrupalCon Asia registration launched!

At the beginning of December, we launched registration for DrupalCon Asia, hosted by IITB in Mumbai, India from February 18-21st. This is the first DrupalCon following the release of Drupal 8.0.0, and the local community has been waiting to enthusiastically welcome the global community to Mumbai.

Cleaning up technical debt

After moving at an accelerated pace towards the end of the year, we chose to close out 2015 focusing on paying down some technical debt. These bug fixes and performance tweaks don't translate into forward facing features, but they do create a faster, more stable, and more secure Drupal.org. Fixing technical debt is unglamorous but essential, and we want to make sure we continue to find the time to tackle these issues in 2016.

Better BDD for Drupal.org

Drupal.org is the longest running Drupal installation and one of the most complex. There's quite a bit of custom and legacy code on the site to support not only the content and community features, but also all of the services Drupal.org provides (such as the testing interface with DrupalCI, the git repositories, and updates statitistics processing). While there was some existing BDD testing, it's in dire need of an overhaul.

Spending some time on our BDD testing infrastructure will let us have more confidence that our new feature development won't cause unexpected regressions elsewhere on the site. Overhauling this infrastructure will take a bit of time now, but it's an investment that will pay dividends over time.

Infrastructure tuning

Finally, we also spent some time in December tuning our infrastructure. We had just switched the last of our content delivery over to Fastly as our CDN for Drupal.org, and there was some tuning to do in our configuration. Our infrastructure team also spent some time rebuilding some of the virtual machines that are part of our back-end, and cleaning up how we generate the docker images for our new, faster development environments.

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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects.

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

Personal blog tags: whats new on Drupal.org

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