I am a permanent member of the Drupal association, and the director of business development for the association. I do not speak officially for the association, nor do I speak on behalf of the Drupalcon organizing committees. But I do have a blog and I want to have a discussion with the community about smart growth at Drupalcon. (*I've also helped raise approximately a million dollars for the association so they at least listen to me)
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.
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.
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 project has been doing user experience work for several years but the pace has really picked up in 2008. This year alone we've have already completed two studies, both for Drupal 6.
Over the last week Leisa Reichelt, from Mark Boulton design has continued her user experience studies with iteration four of the redesigned Drupal.org site. In testing iteration four here's what the team from Mark Boulton design found.
If you are organizing a Drupalcamp you are probably finding that you are thrust into a fund raising role. As the Drupal association fundraiser, let me offer you a quick tip for raising money to meet your Drupalcamp expenses.
First, follow the rules of BarCamps and keep everything as simple as possible. Don't try to provide too many comforts. Instead, communicate what you need and then what ever you get provided with is what you will have.
