Drupal Association

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.