Back in May the Drupal Assocation with the help of the Drupal.org Content Working Group kicked off user research project for Drupal.org. Our goal was to understand who are our users, how do they use the website, what is their ideal user experience. We wanted to understand what are the main segments of our audience and define their priority so we could focus our development efforts. This user research is a first step on the path to a complete Drupal.org redesign.

Better credit for organizations on Drupal.org

We added a feature to projects on Drupal.org to help highlight the contributions made by supporting organizations. Maintainers of distributions, modules, and themes can give credit to organizations that have materially contributed to projects on Drupal.org using the new “Supporting Organizations" field.

Upcoming deployments

This week we are planning to deploy a solution for multiple values for listings of current companies and organizations, a fix for wrong 'open issues' count on user project page, an upgrade Fasttoggle to 7.x-1.5, and a few smaller patches.

Almost half a year ago, with the help of the Drupal.org Content Working Group and lawyers, the Drupal Association started working on a Drupal.org Terms of Service (ToS) and Privacy Policy. After a number of drafts and rewrites, we are now ready to introduce both documents to Drupal.org users. Read the announcement on Drupal.org for more information.

Upcoming deployments: CDN switch for Drupal.org

We have successfully switched all of the Drupal.org sub-sites over to our CDN (Content Delivery Network) provider. On July 2nd we will be pointing Drupal.org (www.drupal.org) at our CDN. This deployment improves our ability to serve static files (images, javascript, css, patches, etc.) and improves our network routes outside of North America.

At DrupalCon Austin 2014, we officially kicked off the reimagination of Drupal.org with a full-day workshop with Drupal Association staff, Working Groups, select board members and advisors, facilitated by our user experience coach Whitney Hess. In the morning, we did the serious business of defining our objectives, target audiences, metrics for success (KPIs), partners and competitors, and then in the afternoon broke out into teams to brainstorm provisional personas, use case scenarios, and a blue-sky set of features. These are the hypotheses that we will now test in our user research.

Here are a few outcomes of the day...

Upcoming deployments: improvements to comments

You may have noticed that Drupal.org user profiles now let you upload your picture. These will be shown with comments. You can see a preview on the staging site, the HTTP user/password is drupal/drupal: in the issue queue (example) and forum (example). You can log in with your Drupal.org username and password to test more.

There are more improvements to come in the next few weeks. This is the first round of implementation for a design process led by Mark Carver and Bojhan Somers. Read more about the design changes and future work in the issue queue.

Per the 2014 Leadership plan, one of the imperatives for the Drupal Association is making Drupal.org a great tool for the Drupal community, building Drupal adoptions and developer satisfaction. One very important part of a great tool is great user support. The speed and ease with which users can get help when they have a problem greatly affects overall experience.

As with many other things on Drupal.org, historically support has been provided by an amazing group of community volunteers with a little help from the Drupal Association staff. Recently the Drupal Association staff had to step in heavily during a few intense times, such as after the security incident last May, when we reset all user passwords. Association staff answered hundreds of support requests, 24 hours a day, over the week following the incident.

The site is growing and demand for support is growing as well. Luckily so is the Drupal Association’s tech team. As we get more bandwidth, we are planning to do more in terms of user support...

Today is a special edition of week notes. Exactly 2 years ago I published the first post. A lot has happened since then, but we are still happy to share our news and updates every couple of weeks. Here is for the next 2 years!

So... what happened in the past few weeks?

Last summer, we created three Drupal.org working groups: one for content, one for software, and one for infrastructure. Since then, Working Group members have put countless hours of time and energy into making Drupal.org the best it can be! Now that we’re winding to the end of our first year with the working groups, we’d like to announce small changes in membership. We have two new members joining the Drupal.org Software Working Group!