As promised, here is the recorded webinar on SEO for the Drupal.org redesign.

Last year, the Drupal Association hired Mark Boulton Design, with financial support from the community, to work with the Drupal community and re-design Drupal.org. The final design deliverable is the Drupal.org website style guide.

Webinar to educate implementers about drupal.org SEO

Next Wednesday, Dec 9th, at 12PM EST we will be hosting a webinar to help educate the re-design implementers on Drupal.org SEO techniques. All interested members of the Drupal community are welcome to register and attend the webinar.

We received word that people were unable to log into this webinar. We have recorded the webinar and will be posting it shortly for feedback

For the last year the Drupal.org redesign has progressed quietly and steadily. Almost 200 people have participated in the redesign by commenting, discussing, reviewing, testing, designing, theming, or writing code to get it done. We have had 6 re-design sprints (2 in Europe and 4 in the US) and built significant infrastructure to get the redesign development and staging ready for the community to make the final push. We are now asking Drupal consulting shops to step forward and help us implement one section of the redesign.

One of the biggest challenges in working in a large community like the Drupal community is removing bottlenecks. All too often the community can seem to come to a grinding halt on just one issue that can only be managed by one person. On Monday Dries gave a presentation at MIT and talked about how some of the Drupal community’s biggest problems have helped create some of our best solutions. In particular, he cited how our drupal.org server melt down in 2005 lead to the creation of the Drupal association to proactively manage and plan for our infrastructure growth.

The Drupal project will have a booth at Hostingcon, August 10-12th, in Washington, DC. This is the second year we will be at hostingcon meeting with members of the Drupal community and talking to hosting providers. The booth will be staffed by Eric Mandel, from Blackmesh hosting, members of the DC Drupal community, and Drupal hosting providers.

I received word this morning that the Drupal Association has been awarded a booth in the .org pavilion. The Bay Area has a strong Drupal community and we anticipate have a good cross section of support from the local community to help staff the booth. But if you are planning to be at Open Source world, or you would like to help staff the booth, please feel free to sign-up to staff the Drupal booth.

A few weeks ago a community member raised concern on the consulting list about turn over in the Drupal association, or rather the lack of it. Since this information is often public, but hard to track down, I thought I'd shed some light.

Ten people have rotated on and off the board of the Drupal
association. Only four original board members are still present.
The board has two new members as of 2009 for the Drupal association, who were not previously permanent members of the association: Tiffany Farriss and Cary Gordon.

Narayan Newton and I gave a talk at Drupalcon on the state of the http://drupal.org infrastructure. Narayan, Gerhard, David, and myself are currently working on a infrastructure budget proposal for the Drupal association. This proposal will give you some insight into the challenges of running Drupal.org and why it is not just another Drupal site. In fact, our use of Drupal as a web application platform for Drupal.org pushes the Drupal project in many directions that lead to innovation.

The Drupal association has been using CiviCRM for a couple of years now. As part of the redesign effort we upgraded the Drupal association site to Drupal 6 and CiviCRM 2.1.

With the help from the Donald Lobo of the CiviCRM team and David Strauss we now have automatic membership renewal notices working in CiviCRM 2.1. With previous versions we had technical difficulties with membership renewal notices and would send renewal reminders out in batches.