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.

Better account creation
Community User Role Expanded

The community user role which we introduced in March will now be automatically granted to users who reach a certain level of participation on Drupal.org. While the exact activities that can grant this role will not be explicitly published (as we do with other spam prevention measures) the activities are representative of those an engaged community member would take while participating on Drupal.org.

Existing users who have already reached the required level of contribution will receive the role upon their next activity on Drupal.org. As of the end of April the automatic role granting had extended the Community user role to more than 5000 users.

Content Strategy and Visual Design System for Drupal.org

and

Making Drupal.org Search Usable

During April the Association staff focused on communicating the results and recommendations of our Content Strategy work with the Working Groups and the Drupal Association Board of Directors.

A deep investigation of the current organization of content on Drupal.org, the workflow provided by Drupal.org for our User Personas, and the governance of content on Drupal.org has brought us to a comprehensive proposal for the future state of Drupal.org.

These proposals involve creating new sections on Drupal.org that better match to common user activities and better content types to support those activities. As we begin organizing Drupal.org into new and updated content types we’ll also be rolling in our initiative to improve search on Drupal.org. As we work on each content type we’ll be assessing the search facets for each type.

The next step to move this proposal forward has been to create issues for the specific proposals that have evolved from the content strategy project to date and the feedback from the Working Groups.

This issue and child issues that follow are based on the findings of the Content Strategy project performed by the Drupal Association staff in partnership with Forum One Communications during December 2014 - April 2015.

Community Initiatives (D8 Blockers)
DrupalCI

Drupal Association staff and community volunteers have continued pushing hard to get DrupalCI production ready and integrated with Drupal.org.

The community helped tremendously by providing some formal guidance into the minimum viable and ideal state of the test environments.
Association staff has the primary environment successfully running all tests, and will be working on the additional environments as well as the Drupal.org integration in the run up to DrupalCon Los Angeles.

Again - tremendous thanks to our community volunteers who sprinted with us in Portland: Jeremy Thorson, Nick Schuch, Bastian Widmer, Ricardo Amaro, Paul Mitchum, Mike Prasuhn, Karoly Negyesi-- and to Shayamala Rajaram, Angie Byron, and Jonathan Hedstrom who helped us from afar!

Localize.Drupal.org

In partnership with the community members who have been working on the port of localize.Drupal.org to Drupal 7, association staff have been working to get this migration across the finish line.

We focused fire on the issues found in click-testing, and hope to deploy localize.Drupal.org on Drupal 7 in May.

Revenue-related projects (funding our work)
Try Drupal

We’ve created Try Drupal with our Premium Hosting Supporters to make it easier for CMS evaluators and Drupal.org newcomers to test and work with a Drupal demo site. The Program will showcase a selection of Hosting Companies where a new user can quickly (in less than 20 minutes) sign up and have a Drupal demo site up and running for them to use for free.

DrupalCons

It’s almost time for DrupalCon Los Angeles! In the run up to DrupalCon Los Angeles we’ve been fixing bugs on Events.Drupal.org and preparing for the launch of the DrupalCon Barcelona full site.

We’ve also just started planning out our work for the next Cons to be announced at DrupalCon Los Angeles - more to come there after Los Angeles!

Sustaining Support and Maintenance
Pre-Production Infra Rebuild

An issue was reported to the Drupal.org infrastructure team that uncovered an installed rootkit on our pre-production (dev and staging) environment on April 19th. We stopped all services on these servers. The access was gained through an open VNC port on our OpenStack environment that allowed hijacking of an open console session. The attacker was attempting to create a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on targeted IPs.

There is no evidence that information was taken from our staging database or that user information was compromised.

To ensure site integrity, we rebuilt our staging and development environments. Our infrastructure team took the opportunity during the rebuild to address some best practices and better security configuration options. The majority of these environments are now on Amazon Web Services. Particularly for our development environments, this gives us options for more easily scaling up and down our development needs, and gives us more separation between production and pre-production servers.

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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.