Drupal Association

We have a new Drupal.org Redesign initiative page, a good way to organize issues. I still have a lot of work to do filling out issues. This should be best place to track progress and get started.

The infrastructure team and myself have been working to improve the staging site, redesign.drupal.org, access to code in BZR, access to a database, and even complete development environments.

There is still plenty of organizing to do; I expect volunteers will be able to be immediately productive next week.

We have a new staging site at redesign.drupal.org. There are a lot of rough edges. It will be a good way to see our progress. As much as possible, it is automated; theme changes every minute and database changes from drupal.org every day. More on the infrastructure is in the handbook.

I’ve been busy collecting everything that has been done so far; making sure everything is either committed to the correct place or has an issue on Drupal.org, including work from 10 SVN sandboxes. Issue queues still need review. If you would like to hear an audio update, Lullabot did a podcast with Git migrator Sam Boyer and myself.

I’ll be looking for help with:

• Theme
• Drupalists
• Dashboard content and implementation
• Home page, including the map
• And much more

I’m pleased to announce that, starting today, I am starting as the Drupal.org Redesign Architect, joining Git migration lead Sam Boyer and 3 more forthcoming positions. My responsibilities are:

• Work with the Drupal.org redesign team, including infrastructure team, theme maintainers, project module maintainers, implementers and project managers.
• Create an implementation plan for each section with functional descriptions and user stories of the work to be implemented so teams can complete them. Includes priorities and rough time estimates.
• Manage the deployment of each redesigned site.
• Provide regular updates to the community.

I’ve been volunteering on the redesign implementation since the start, but I haven't been responsible for high-level planning until now. This week I’ll be jumping in to see where everything is and what I can get launched.

• Get the Bluecheese theme running on subsites. The Drupal Association launched shortly after DrupalCon SF, and Localize last week. API and Groups are next. These sites are a good testing ground for the new theme before it goes to Drupal.org.
• Meet with everyone and see where everything is; especially, content, search, project, and dashboard.
• Familiarize myself with recent infrastructure developments; we now manage deployments with BZR and Hudson.
• Go through issue queues for all components.

I’m excited to get this project done. Drupal.org is a large Drupal deployment with a lot of moving parts. It is a bit daunting and will take a few weeks. With a new Drupal.org we can provide a better home for contributors to work and new users to learn.

An important part of the Drupal.org redesign is the dashboard. Power users have a towers of navigation, contributor, and/or documentation links on every page. That is clutter when you don’t need to jump to another section of the site. And one size does not fit all; there are a few options now, but either you turn on a block of links or you don’t.

The redesigned pages clean up the administrative clutter. You will be able to build your own, or keep the good defaults, dashboard to watch and get to what you care about. However, the content in the prototype is mostly positional. We need to design and build the widgets that are most useful for the Drupal community. We need to know what will help you be more productive on Drupal.org.

I started building out a dashboard module at the previous Drupal.org redesign sprints. But, it needs a lot more work. In addition to the issue queue, I made a wiki page to track priorities. I’ll be at DrupalCon Paris looking for people to help work on this important functionality.

By the way, the API.drupal.org work I wrote about, launched a few days ago. Thanks for all the testing and feedback. There are already a a few comments. There are still a lot of improvements needed, especially rewriting the parser. Find me if you want to help make more improvements.

• Josh finished the cross site activity client and server. It is now ready for modules to implement activities, such as commenting, project issue followups, and CVS commits.
• Karoly continued working on the documentation parser and API commenting.
• Matt finished the Apache Solr search facets implementing Mark Boulton’s prototype and implemented a jQuery drop down results sorter.
• Todd continued work on the Bluecheese theme.
• Chris finished mapping out Drupal.org’s current content and worked on mapping the prototype’s content. This will show what existing content we need to fit in and reveals any content we need to write.
• I worked on the dashboard with Dmitri and Ken.

Single sign on, comments for the API reference, search, and project pages all had significant progress during this sprint and will be deployed in the next 2 or 3 weeks.

This was the 3rd multi-day sprint, and there have been 2 one-day sprints. 57 people have SVN accounts and 144 people have joined the redesign implementers group. We are building a flexible and well-engineered theme and a suite of modules for single-sign-on, activity, and dashboard widgets shared among multiple sites. Drupal.org and its subsites have a lot of moving parts supporting the Drupal community. There is still a lot of work to do, especially in the modules we are building and doing editorial work on the content.

Thanks again to the Drupal community making this possible via the Drupal Association.

During a lunch at the Paris sprint, Dries suggested doing a sprint in San Francisco. I ran with the idea and now we are working on implementing the Drupal.org redesign at Chapter 3’s freshly-refurnished office. Mark Burdett, Matt Cheney, Erik Hopp, Josh Koenig, Kieran Lal, Courtney Miller, Todd Ross Nienkerk, Colin Sagan, David Strauss, and I are busy implementing the new Drupal.org. Chris Bryant, Dmitri Gaskin, Karoly Negyesi, Stephanie Pakrul, and Derek Wright are joining us later this week. I am working on the dashboard and helping organize everything. Kieran has a full list of what we are working on.

Thanks to Chapter 3 for expediting their new desks making room for 12 more people. AF83 and Advomatic are each buying lunches for us. The Drupal Association provided funding for some flights and hotels, we are keeping costs low by couch surfing and using local talent as much as possible.

If you want to help, join the group and #drupal-infrastructure. We are filing many issues to track the progress. We will be working through the weekend. Drupal.org is a big site with many moving parts, with more being added, all being built and maintained by volunteers. The effort in Cologne, Cambridge, Paris, and Washington D.C. has been amazing and shows what this community can accomplish.