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 8 will be released on November 19th!

Drupal 8 is finally on its way and no-one is more excited than we are. The Association plays a critical role in providing the supporting infrastructure and developer tools that make the release of Drupal possible. In September we focused hard on making sure Drupal.org was ready for the Release Candidate, and now we have a final release date for Drupal 8.0.0 of November 19th!

Releasing the next major version of Drupal is no small endeavor. In October we focused hard on ensuring there will be no infrastructure blockers for the release of Drupal 8. We also spent time designing the release page and improvements to the download experience which we will implement before release day.

What better reason than the release of Drupal 8 to celebrate? We've added a category for Drupal 8 release parties to groups.Drupal.org - so please post your events there, or look there for one to attend!

Drupal Association Membership Campaign

With the imminent launch of Drupal 8, now is a better time than ever to become a member of the Drupal Association. In mid-October we launched a membership campaign with the goal of adding an additional 1,000 members to our current base of 3,200 and raising an additional $100,000.

To support this campaign we placed a banner on Drupal.org asking for your support, and asking existing members to share the campaign. The campaign will end on December 30th, and with your help we can sustainably fund ongoing improvements to Drupal.org like the ones you see here every month.

The Drupal.org Roadmap

Content Strategy

Documentation Section

Overhauling documentation on Drupal.org continues to be a top priority coming out of our Content Strategy work. As we continue to build out the features that will be the building blocks of the new Sections on Drupal.org, we want to gather feedback about how our existing users are using the Documentation pages and what improvements are needed.

We've added a survey in the lower right hand corner of every documentation page so that users can provide that feedback before our next round of implementation work.

About Drupal.org - Breadcrumbs in Beta

We're also prototyping some of the new features that will be part of the toolbox for Sections on Drupal.org. A small feature, but a welcome improvement, is the addition of breadcrumb navigation in the new Section content types. Right now you can see a beta of this in the About Drupal.org section.

Search Improvements

In October we continued our efforts to improve the utility of search on Drupal.org. Just in time for the release of Drupal 8, developers can now search for api functions through the Drupal.org search box and receive results from api.Drupal.org.

DrupalCI

In October we enabled DrupalCI testing for Drupal 7 and Drupal 6. We are now in the process of validating that testing for these legacy versions is functioning correctly before disabling legacy testbots and statically archiving qa.Drupal.org. Drupal 8 testing on the legacy system has already been disabled.

We are also focusing on tuning DrupalCI to economize the testing process. Each Drupal 8 core test job runs over 12,000 tests containing approximately 100,000 code assertions. From September to October we have reduced the average time to complete a core test from 40 minutes to 30 minutes and the average cost of a full test job from $0.37 to $0.24. However, with around 12,000 test jobs run in the past month alone (that's 14,400,000,000,000 assertions!) we will continue to look for ways to manage this expense while providing a better, faster testing service for Drupal code.

Spam Fighting
From Wikimedia Commons by user Qwertyxp2000

The announcement of Drupal 8's release candidate lead to a surge in spam activities on Drupal.org, and the Drupal Association pivoted to respond, both by fighting the spam directly and by developing new tools for reporting, blocking, and preventing spam for ourselves and the community volunteers who help to fight spam on Drupal.org every day. We made the following changes:

• We upgraded Flag module to version 3.
• Our report spam links on Drupal.org now use Flag.
• We built new views for spam fighters to manage content reported as spam.
• We increased our rate limiting to prevent bulk submissions.
• We removed automatic granting of higher user roles - there are now enough Community level users on Drupal.org to confirm new users manually.
• We eliminated spam targets by fixing content filtering to rel="nofollow" user submitted links in more places.

Going into November we are hoping to implement some new tools from our Technology Supporter Distil Networks to help prevent spam registrations before they occur.

Revenue Related Projects (Funding our work)

Beyond the membership campaign we're continuing our regular work on upcoming DrupalCons. Registration for DrupalCon Asia—the FIRST DrupalCon after the release of Drupal 8!—will open soon. We're very excited to celebrate Drupal 8's release with the local community in Mumbai and with the wider community in Asia.

Design work for DrupalCon Dublin is ongoing in anticipation of the full site launch. In consultation with the local community we have some great design concepts that will really tell the story of Drupal in Dublin. We think you'll really enjoy it!

Sustaining support and maintenance

Faster Drupal.org Development Environments

Deploying a hosted development environment for contributing to Drupal.org is one of the critical services provided by the Drupal Association. These environments are used both by our internal staff and by community volunteers who are creating features for Drupal.org. As recently as a year ago it has taken up to 3 hours to spin up a new development environment. As recently as September it took around an hour and twenty minutes.

By providing our sanitized nightly snapshot of the Drupal.org database as a docker container we're now able to provide new development environments for Drupal.org in approximately 10 minutes. Even in a short time this has improved our feature development velocity.

Upgrades and Improvements

In addition to improving our development environments, we've focused on upgrading our the operating system on many of our servers to CentOS 6.7, and making sure that our Solr infrastructure is highly-available.

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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