In the DA Member survey this spring, community members answered the question What could/should the Drupal Association be doing (that it’s not currently doing) to build up memberships? Our survey respondents told us that it would be good to promote the Drupal Association and membership program better, and more frequently, than we’ve been doing.
In 2005 drupal.org was failing. Growing rapidly, the site competed for resources on a shared server and without full-time support it became a target for hackers. Drupal.org may not be what it is today without early support from Sun Microsystems, the financial donations of hundreds of Drupal users, and generous support from Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSUOSL).
Tezza is doing great job reviewing case studies together with lisarex and kwseldman. We are slowly adding more of them to the Featured section. There is always a room for more reviewers - take a look at the wiki if you'd like to help.
The new events page for groups.drupal.org is basically ready. Few things are stopping it from being deployed. One of them - Better exposed filters module, which we need to install on groups.drupal.org, more accurately - this patch for Better exposed filters needs some testing.
Olá! Join Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert and core committer Angie Byron this December 6-8 in beautiful Brazil to bring a little Carnaval to Drupal. DrupalCon São Paulo will focus primarily on content for Drupal developers, but there will of course be plenty to offer for designers, themers, project managers, architects, engineers, and those involved with the business side of Drupal.
I helped start the Drupal Association in 2006 because we needed a checking account for the $10,000 or so required to produce a Drupal conference and to support our infrastructure. In a short six years, we grew the Drupal Association from a volunteer-run organization to one of the largest Open Source non-profit foundations with an operating budget of $3 million USD and 8 full-time employees. Today, we support over 18,000 developers, 9,000 conference attendees, 2,300 individual donors, 800 organizations, and a web presence that reaches over two million people every month.
DrupalCon would not be the successful conference it is without the amazing website that pulls our community together. Each DrupalCon website is backed by an awesome team of developers that donate hundreds of hours to create an amazing conference website with a robust and rich feature set.
The past 2 weeks have been pretty active and we have some awesome developments to share today.
First, a new slideshow has been added to the Case studies section thanks to bmaheshs and Kapil Juneja from Tekriti Software. This section is now fully ready to showcase the best sites built with Drupal. If you have an impressive site to share, follow the guidelines and publish your own case study.
Late last year, the Drupal Association announced a targeted fundraising campaign to build a fund to tackle the challenge of improving Drupal.org. Special T-shirts were offered in conjunction with Drupal Association membership, with net proceeds of those shirts set-aside for the sole purpose of improving the website at the heart of our community.
Thank You!
Thanks to your generous help, we raised over US$12,000! But we also raised awareness about the importance of Drupal.org. When the board of the association met in December they made improving Drupal.org the number one objective for 2012, and set aside additional budget to help make that happen.
A lot has happened since November 2011. Here's a quick summary of pointers to more information for those of you curious to know. To keep up to date, join the Drupal.org Improvements group and follow @drupal_org on Twitter.
Drupal Global Training Days is an initiative set forth earlier this year to introduce new and beginning users to Drupal. The Drupal Association is partnering with training companies around the world to make this happen, and the next Drupal Global Training Day is June 22. We would love your help in spreading the word and in helping us grow your Drupal Community.
These free or low cost training events will be offered on June 22, and then once a quarter, with one of two curriculums:
