Look for links to our Strategic Roadmap highlighting how this work falls into our priorities set by the Drupal Association Board and Drupal.org Working Groups.

Drupal.org
Iterative Changes to the Front Page of Drupal.org

The home page of Drupal.org has been changing in several small but important ways. The main focus of our design work in June was to provide new community metrics to replace the less meaningful and somewhat misleading metrics that were removed in the previous home page update.

We also updated the text of the Try Drupal button on Drupal.org, to better clarify the purpose of the feature. Try Drupal allows potential users to evaluate Drupal by using a highly polished demo hosted by our Supporting Partners. This gives Drupal newcomers and learners the chance to see examples of Drupal configured at its best, to encourage evaluators to choose Drupal for their needs. The program supports a core part of the mission of the Drupal Association: helping to promote Drupal and grow Drupal adoption.

Improving Drupal.org Performance with Advanced Aggregator

The Association has also been working to improve the performance of Drupal.org using Advanced CSS/JS aggregation, with the help of mikeytown2.

These configuration changes have been made carefully to ensure they don’t degrade the user experience for any user of the site - and are continuing into July.

The Plan Category for Drupal.org Issues

Another small deployment made in June was the addition of a Plan category to the Drupal.org issue queues.

The Plan category codifies the informal [meta] issues into a category selectable within the Issues UI.

This only scratches the surface of a long-buried issue in the Drupal.org issue queues - a lack of project management and prioritization tools. The larger Content Strategy work that the Drupal Association is beginning to implement will help to address this need further with a new Initiative content type to provide better hierarchy and prioritization tools.

Organization and User Profile Improvements
Recent Issue Credits (3 months) now appear on individual and organization profiles.

Expanding upon the work the Association staff has done to create a system for credit and attributions in the Issue queues, the Association has begun displaying information about issue credits on user’s Drupal.org profiles.

Whenever a project maintainer has credited the user in an issue when marking the issue closed - the project will appear on the profile, along with a link to a list of the credited issues.

Additional improvements are planned for the crediting UI to allow credit attribution to users who did not comment directly on the issue. The Association will also begin to backfill historical credit data.

Organizations benefit from this change as well. When a maintainer closes an issue and assigns credit, if any of the users being credited have attributed the work to an organization - that issue credit will be displayed on the organization page. This change rewards those organizations that give their employees time to give back to Drupal.

Content Strategy and Visual Design System for Drupal.org

In May, the long-running Content Strategy work culminated the presentation of the Drupal Association’s proposal for a new content model on Drupal.org. In June, after monitoring feedback from the Drupal community and the Working Groups following DrupalCon Los Angeles - we transitioned  from planning the new Information Architecture to planning the implementation details to make the new content model a reality on Drupal.org.

Implementation of the new content model and governance plan is going to involve quite a few changes to the modules on Drupal.org, so we want to approach the implementation iteratively and carefully.

Our plan developed in June calls for us to create the new ‘Why Drupal’ section of the site first. In June, we prototyped an implementation of this first section using Organic Groups and Panelizer and prepared a plan for performance profiling.

Issue Workflow and Git Improvements

The Association Team is excited to implement our vision for new issue workspaces on Drupal.org - including a new spin on the implementation of pull requests.

Work on the Issue Workspaces is slated to begin once major work on DrupalCI is complete, and we are able to retire the PIFT/PIFR testing system without regressions.

However, we were able to remove a blocker to this work by updating our servers for our Git architecture (more below in sustaining support and maintenance.)

Community Initiatives
DrupalCI

DrupalCI was a major focus of the Drupal Association staff in June. In June the integration between DrupalCI and Drupal.org was enabled for the first time. DrupalCI is now running in parallel with the PIFT/PIFR testbots to provide us a reference frame to prove out the implementation.

A remaining MVP hit list was codified in June - representing the few remaining issues needed to meet the guidelines set out by the Drupal core developers. (Spoilers: Most of these issues are resolved at the time of this posting in July!).

Going into July the focus will be on providing testing for Contrib through DrupalCI, and then ensuring that there are no regressions in functionality or test result detail as compared to PIFT/PIFR so that the old test bots can be retired.

Once that is achieved, the Assocation’s work on DrupalCI will scale back to maintaining the system’s stability- and more development focus will be provided to our next initiatives.

Localize.Drupal.org

At the end of June we initiated a final round of community testing for the port of localize.drupal.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.

That testing period has ended as of the first week of June, and we are now working together with the community to resolve the issues uncovered by this final testing before deployment.

Revenue-related projects (funding our work)
DrupalCons

Registration for DrupalCon Barcelona opened in June, with some small refinements to the registration process from lessons learned in DrupalCon Los Angeles.

Events.Drupal.org did receive one new front-facing feature, an opportunity in the registration process for ticket purchasers to purchase or renew their Individual or Organization memberships with the Drupal Association.

The Drupal Association is also working very closely with the DrupalCon Asia designer in preparation for the full site launch in the coming months.

Better Cart Management on Jobs.drupal.org

On Drupal Jobs we deployed a small update to the checkout workflow to make cart management easier - addressing the top support request that we receive from our users.

Future development for Drupal Jobs continues to be limited to the most high-impact bugs or features identified in the support requests we receive for job postings.

Signature Supporting Partners Page Launched

June also saw the launch of the Signature Supporting Partner program. This required a small update to our supporting partners page to support the new partner category.

Sustaining Support and Maintenance

Final work preparing for deployment of our new git servers was completed in June - but for scheduling reasons the maintenance window for replacing our existing Git infrastructure was scheduled to take place on 7/9/2015. (This deployment was successful!)

Our Fastly CDN deployment for updates traffic (updates.drupal.org) was also successful. Updates now use dynamic purging to reduce the number of requests served by our origin servers and decreases the latency between packaging a release and serving the update data from a number of minutes to a few seconds.

As part of the updates deployment with Fastly, we now have a *.drupal.org wildcard TLS/SSL certificate for https://updates.drupal.org and https://ftp.drupal.org. This enables HTTPS support on all of Drupal.org and its’ sub-sites for the first time.

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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all volunteers who are working 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