One of our long standing traditions here in the Drupal Association was to give community regular updates on the latest Drupal.org related activities in a form of week notes posts. We’ve been publishing those for over 2.5 years now and it feels like the time has come for a slight change in the format.

From now on we’ll publish monthly ‘What’s new on Drupal.org’ posts, which will showcase new and upcoming features, functionality and user experience improvements. We’ll schedule these around the public Board meetings, so that both the Board and community get the same information at the same time.

So here is our first update in this new format..

What’s new on Drupal.org: February 2015

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
Account creation improvements

Account creation is now much more streamlined, quick, and lets people get back to the context they started from once the registration is done. Recently added 2nd step of registration allows us to prompt users to quickly and easily fill out the most important fields of their user profile, upload picture and sign up for Newsletters, before proceeding back to the task they were at before registering.

Newsletters signups right on your Drupal.org profile

While working on account creation improvements, we wanted to make it really easy for new users to see what kind of newsletters are available and sign up for the ones they are interested in. Previously only Mailman-powered newsletters were available for sign up on Drupal.org, while for the Drupal Association Newsletter we used MailChimp.

MailChimp allows us to send beautifully designed html emails, provides great content creation experience and detailed analytics. Thus we decided to standardize on one solution and migrate existing newsletters from Mailman to MailChimp. This is partially done, with Security Announcements and Maintainer News following soon.

MailChimp module is now installed on Drupal.org, and all various newsletters are available for sign up right on your user profile edit form. Users will also be able to unsubscribe from their profile or using the unsubscribe links provided through MailChimp.

Organization and user profile improvements
Issue comment attribution and credits

Both issue comment attribution and issue credit UI are ready. At the beginning of March, we opened them for community testing. The feedback is pretty positive so far. Deployment is tentatively scheduled for March 12th.

Content Strategy and Redesign

The draft Drupal.org content model was presented to Working Group members and we are now collecting and incorporating feedback, while at the same time working on a more detailed outline of content and entity types. The outline will include detailed information about fields and settings, as well as view modes with wireframes per content type.

The next deliverable, which is about ready for Working Groups feedback is Content Governance Plan, which reflects the new content model and suggest some improvements in the way we govern content: create, edit, moderate, archive and delete.

The third deliverable, which is nearly done as well, is the Communication Channels Plan, which aims to answer the long standing question of “what is the one place I need to go to to find all important Drupal community news and announcements?”.

The next deliverable we are about to switch out focus to is the updated Drupal.org Site Map, which will reflect suggestions for better IA and navigation on *.drupal.org.

DrupalCI (community initiative and Drupal 8 blocker)

DrupalCI may move into a formal initiative in March as staff works to implement a production environment with the help of the community members that have been involved in the architecture and development.

The test runner is nearly working. Several major portions of the stack are in production—if not yet totally configured—as well as the PrivateTravis containers running php 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 with mod_php. Overall, it is proceeding on track to have an MVP ready by the end of the sprint sponsored via Drupal 8 accelerate program, which is scheduled to take place at the end of March in Portland.

Revenue-related projects (funding our work)
DrupalCon Los Angeles

On February 25th, registration for DrupalCon Los Angeles went live on the new Drupal Events (events.drupal.org) subsite. Events will be the primary site for all DrupalCon websites moving forward as well as the archive for past events. This will give us great flexibility with historical reporting and make maintenance and security releases for DrupalCon websites more efficient. It also means that any new feature development for DrupalCon websites now benefits all future con sites.

The first of those new features is a set of improvements to registration. We’ve streamlined the experience of purchasing a ticket both for individual users, but also for users who may be purchasing large blocks of tickets for their organization. There are three time-saving new registration features:

1. Users can now copy their registration data from a previous ticket. This means that a user purchasing several kinds of tickets such as the DrupalCon ticket and a Business Summit ticket can save time entering fields. It also means that users attending future cons will be able to save time entering their registration data for the next Con.
2. Someone purchasing a ticket on behalf of another attendee can now enter that attendee’s email address and a link to redeem the ticket will be sent to them. This saves the purchaser time, and allows the attendee to keep their registration data private.
3. Finally someone purchasing a large block of tickets who does not yet know who will attend can now purchase reservation codes which can be given out to attendees to be redeemed.

We’re also working closely with our early registrants and DrupalCon sponsors to further streamline these new features.

Sustaining Support and Maintenance
Elections 2015

In February, we spent some time polishing the nominations and voting functionality on assoc.d.o, which powers 2015 Drupal Association Board Elections. This year we have much better looking nomination pages, as well as more smooth voting process. Voting is open until March 20. Have you voted yet?

Fastly

The Drupal.org download infrastructure (ftp.drupal.org) is undergoing an architecture refresh. Fastly has signed on as a Drupal.org Technology Supporter and the existing FTP mirror infrastructure is being dissolved in favor of the CDN backed by Drupal.org’s static web servers.

Server Density

Server Density (drupal.serverdensity.io) was selected as our replacement for Nagios alerting and Munin graphing. Server Density provides us with an alternative to OSL’s shared Nagios and Munin instances, and does not require us to host and manage our own internal monitoring service. Server Density also supports Nagios checks and integrates nicely with our existing infrastructure.

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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