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.

DrupalCon Barcelona Recap

DrupalCon Barcelona was an opportunity for Drupal Association staff to meet with members of the community, attend some critical sessions about upcoming development in Core and Contrib, and to present some sessions of our own.

Highlights

• The big one: Dries announced a new development workflow for Drupal. Rather than organizing development around commits to a single dev branch, Drupal core will be developed in feature branches following the release of 8.0.0.
  • Core's switch to feature branch based development further increases the value of our planned work for Issue Workspaces on Drupal.org, which will allow a true git based workflow on Drupal.org, complete with pull requests, while preserving the ability to submit patches as well.
• Community members webflo and tstoeckler gave a presentation on Composer and Drupal 8. As part of the Q&A portion of the session we discussed ways that Drupal.org can support the composer workflow for core and contrib, while preserving the site builder experience.
• We presented an overview of the content strategy work that has been done for Drupal.org, and what is left to do.
• We gave a session on the future of groups on Drupal.org.

Being able to speak with the community face to face is a tremendously valuable opportunity for us, and helps us to validate our priorities, and keep on top of the changing needs of the community. Barcelona was a great con on both fronts!

The Drupal.org Roadmap

Improved Search on Drupal.org

In August, we upgraded our search infrastructure, identified criteria for evaluating our search improvements, and created a pre-production search environment to allow us to test our changes to search. By September we were ready to begin deploying changes.

We used a script which evaluates the change in position of results for the key search phrases we are using as exemplars. Then we deployed several changes, primarily to our biases for searches matching path aliases and project machine names. These changes have greatly elevated the desired results for our exemplar phrases in search.

We're pleased with these improvements, and may continue to tune search further, especially as community members provide additional search phrases with unexpected results that we can test against.

Documentation Improvements

One of the larger initiatives for September was to work on improvements to Documentation on Drupal.org. This is a clear priority from the community, and also an important part of the work we identified as part of our content strategy.

To implement the requirements of the content strategy we introduced a few new modules to Drupal.org, in particular: organic groups, and panels. These and a few supporting modules have allowed us to create the new Section content type one Drupal.org. Sections are groups, which can have their own maintainers and governance structure. Content (including child Sections) will be associated to this new higher level Section content. Panels and some preconfigured layouts will allow us to improve the layout of content on Drupal.org and create a more consistent look and feel.

In September we made the initial deployment of these underlying modules and configuration and we are now beginning to configure our first Section - Documentation. At the same time, we reached out to key members of the documentation community during September, both remotely and at DrupalCon Barcelona, to identify more specific user stories that we will build out as features on this framework.

DrupalCI

Our focus for DrupalCI in September was identifying any work that needed to be done to allow us to shut off the old PIFT/PIFR testbots on qa.drupal.org, and any feature improvements and bug fixes as they were identified. We also wanted to ensure that D8 Core and Contrib developers were comfortable relying on the new system.

During September we made progress on a few fronts. Firstly, users who create tests or project maintainers can subscribe to email notifications about their tests. Secondly, we continued fixing issues on the critical path to allowing us to disable the old testbots. Finally, about a week prior to DrupalCon Barcelona we allowed DrupalCI test results to set issues to needs work, letting Core maintainers accelerate their testing in the ramp up to the Con.

In October we anticipate disabling PIFT/PIFR for Drupal 8 testing entirely, and then phasing it out for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 testing as well, once testing in those environments has been vetted. At that point the old qa.drupal.org test results will be archived statically. Moving forward DrupalCI development will move more into stable maintenance of the system as a production service, and evaluation of feature requests and contributed community work.

Localize.drupal.org

Localize.Drupal.org needed had only a few key issues to tackle in September - primarily: a server side version fall back system for translations. A related issue allowing us to symlink translations to the ‘latest’ release was completed as well.

The final task for Localize, and one of the Drupal.org infrastructure blockers to an 8.0.0 release, is support for translatables with external dependencies(for contrib). The community has been iterating on patches for this feature, and it should be fixed soon.

Incremental Improvements to Drupal.org

Updating the Marketplace

In order to celebrate the organizations that are supporting the development of Drupal 8, we launched some changes to the Drupal.org marketplace. First, we changed the organization listings themselves, highlighting the people at the organization, the projects supported, the case studies, and the issue credits awarded in the last 90 days.

Finally, instead of sorting the listings alphabetically, we now sort by the listings by issue credits. This highlights the organizations who have been working hard to move the project forward and get Drupal 8 released!

We've received a lot of positive feedback about the Marketplace changes, as well as a large amount of community feedback about additional improvements that could be made, particularly to the sorting algorithm. We'll continue to collect that feedback and iterate on this further.

Revenue Related Projects (Funding our Work)

DrupalCon Dublin

As is tradition, at DrupalCon Barcelona we also launched our next European DrupalCon - DrupalCon Dublin! For this initial announcement we launched the con splash page, but as the event gets closer the full site will go live. The Drupal Association and the local Drupal community in Dublin are very excited to welcome you to this con! Céad Míle Fáilte!

Sustaining support and maintenance

In addition to the infrastructure team's strong focus on DrupalCI and ensuring that the testing infrastructure was stable through DrupalCon Barcelona, the infrastructure team also made a few other changes. First, we evaluated a PHP version upgrade in our pre-production environments, and will deploy to prod in October. Secondly, we took the Solr infrastructure that had been upgraded in August, and set it up for high availability.

The Drupal Association infrastructure team also gave a presentation on the history of Drupal.org's infrastructure. This session provided a retrospective of the architectural decisions for Drupal.org in the past, as well as an opportunity to showcase where the infrastructure is headed and solicit feedback from the community.

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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