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

The Community user role is the next step of a larger project of improving user role progression on Drupal.org. We began this work by streamlining the account creation and login workflow, which makes it easier for newcomers to jump into Drupal.org and contribute without losing context. The Community user role extends this work further by providing new tools to our existing community members and broadly expanding the base of users who can help shepherd newcomers into the community.

We started by simply adding a “New” indicator to all user accounts under 90 days old. It’s a small but critical change that helps long standing community members recognize newcomers to the fold, and encourages them to give these new users a warm welcome and a bit of extra help.

The basis of the Community user role is the old spam fighter role, which previously was manually granted to only a small subset of users. This role has primarily been responsible for confirming that other users on the site are not spammers (by granting them ‘trusted’, now called ‘confirmed’). The expanded Community role has the same job - to confirm that users are human - but will now be a role that can be automatically achieved when users reach a certain level of engagement on Drupal.org. We expect as many as 10,000 users to receive this role in the initial grant when the new feature is enabled. This should dramatically increase the attention paid to confirm new users, and make the process of confirming new users at code sprints and training days much, much easier.

The role itself has already been created, and the ‘confirm’ button appears on user profiles. Early April we’ll make sure that users with Community role can confirm users within comments as well - and then enable the initial role grant along with a communication to all Community users.

Organization and user profile improvements
Issue Comment Attribution and maintainer Credit UI

In mid march we launched the UI for attributing comments as individuals - as individuals on behalf of an organization - or as individuals on behalf of an organization and/or a customer.

Since the release of the comment attribution feature 3 weeks ago, we’ve seen 5,564 comments in the issue queues attributed to an organization, representing around 14% of total comments in the issues queues.

We’ve also just launched the UI for project maintainers to take the attribution data and store final credit for the users and organizations.

All these steps bring a greater level of transparency and introspection to the project and let give us some real data about how Drupal is driven forward. Work on this attribution system will be ongoing, with an option to explicitly attribute comments as a volunteer being released shortly, and work towards integrating these attributions into commit messages coming up soon. We’ll also be updating both organization and user profiles to better display the work that has been credited in issues.

Making Drupal.org Search Usable

We have scheduled time with a community member that has extensive Solr configuration experience to see what quick wins we can achieve through better configuration.

More extensive search improvements are going to come out of the content strategy work as we define the most important information to show per content type when they appear as a result in search.

Content Strategy and Redesign

The draft Governance plan outline was finished and presented to Working Group members last month. This follows previously shared draft Drupal.org Content Model. Forum One was busy working on the first draft version of the updated Site map for Drupal.org.

In the second half of the month we were focused on working out detailed content types outline. We had a set of brainstorming meetings, where we discussed how all those potential new content types could be implemented technically. Those brainstorms, as well as helpful feedback from the Working Groups, led us to some of the new ideas and changes to the original plans. Hence we are now working on the next revision of all content strategy deliverables, revision which will incorporate all feedback from the Working Group members we have so far.

At this point all the different conversations about separate parts of the whole content strategy project fall into place and we see a clear picture of future state content strategy and information architecture of Drupal.org. We are excited to transfer this vision into a set of slides we can share with the Working Groups, Board and the Drupal Community.

DrupalCI (community initiative and Drupal 8 blocker)

We’ve just wrapped up hosting the DrupalCI sprint made possible by Drupal 8 accelerate. It was a herculean effort, but we made tremendous progress.

The architecture of the complete stack was built out, the test runner code built to it’s final form, containers for test environments created, and we ran through the complete chain from API → Test Runner → Results Site. There is still significant work ahead, but the community members who joined us in Portland did phenomenal work and put in long nights and extra days to produce an impressive testing suite.

Association staff architected the integration point between Drupal.org and the DrupalCI API and designed the UI for interacting with DrupalCI in the issue queues. On April 8th, association staff and the community volunteers we sprinted with met to recap the sprint and discuss the roadmap items that remain.

Special 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!

Revenue-related projects (funding our work)
Try Drupal

Early in April, we’ll be releasing some small changes to the Drupal.org home page -- changes that we will continue to iterate on over the course of the coming months. Primarily we’re trying to create rational pathways through the front page for each of our user personas, as well as updating the homepage to better promote and support some of our revenue programs. Try Drupal is one such program that serves both goals.

For Newcomers to the Drupal community Try Drupal will ensure that their first experience with Drupal is first class, by helping these users create a Drupal site in 20 minutes or less. In return, our partners providing this service get to put the best of their work forward together with the best of Drupal.

DrupalCon Barcelona

Even as we ramp up to DrupalCon Los Angeles in May, we’re getting ready to release the full site for DrupalCon Barcelona. This will be the second site on the new events.Drupal.org unified site, so we’ve be proving out some of the work we did to make it multi-event friendly, and making some additional adjustments and changes as we need them.

We’ll also be preparing for announcements for next year’s cons (Shh!) so there’s some additional UX and feature work underway to support those upcoming sites as well.

Sustaining Support and Maintenance
Elections 2015

Elections were a great success this year. Improvements to the candidate profiles, ballot pages, and voting UI helped us reach our highest level of community engagement in Board elections. 24 candidates from 14 countries nominated, and with 1,432 ballots cast, we doubled our voter turnout compared to last year.

Congratulations to Addison Berry who joins as the new Director-at-Large from the community!

We’re collecting feedback on the experience from both candidates and voters and will continue to improve the elections process next year.

Fastly

The Drupal.org updates infrastructure (updates.drupal.org) is next to receive an architecture refresh. We are working to move the updates infrastructure to use a similar “instance purge” model, allowing for updates to be delivered more quickly. This also lets us set a very long TTL because new updates will purge the previous versions.

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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