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Earlier this year we asked you to vote on improvements to Drupal.org that you would like to see happen. Request for a better showcase of Drupal websites was in the top 5 by the results of the voting. This week we are happy to announce a revamped Case studies section. This section is a space for members of our community to share what they have been working on and get some feedback. At the same time we hope that it will be helpful for people evaluating Drupal as possible solution by providing real-life examples of awesome sites built with Drupal, technical details of their implementation and details of project management process. Thank you to lisarex, larowlan, drumm and all other community members that made this possible!

Last week we launched the revamped Case Studies section on drupal.org. More improvements to layout and filtering are planned. This section can be a great help for people evaluating various solutions and figuring out how Drupal can help them. It can be a great marketing tool for Drupal project as a whole.

For this to be a success, we need to regularly populate this section with high quality case studies that will be featured on the Drupal.org homepage. We are looking to build a team of dedicated people who will work on Case Studies section on a constant basis, particularly writers, editors and marketing professionals.

You only need to commit to spending 1 hour per week on this initiative, though if you want to do more, that's great!

What exactly you could be doing:

During past 2 weeks we had slow progress on all fronts, with the biggest impediment - resource constraints (as in too few people to do too many things).

We are very close to deployment of updates to Case studies section on drupal.org. This will be the first step of redesign of that section. In future we are planning to add slideshow (bmaheshs and the team at Tekriti Software are working on this right now) and various other enhancements.

This summer the Drupal Association is tacklng a number of initiatives to make drupal.org awesome and to improve Cod for use at DrupalCon. To help complete these initiatives we're looking for a few good developers to jump in and help out. As an open source project there are many ways you can be a part of the team. Review the projects we're working on and choose the one that's right for you:

The next DrupalCon North America event is taking shape for Portland, Oregon, May 20-24, 2013. The venue and hotel are set. It’s a given that there will be coffee, bikes, mountains, bridges, rivers and salmon. It’s the Silicon Forest and there’s lots of open source here. In fact, it’s where the Drupal Association is now located too. And although we host the DrupalCons, we don’t have the staff to do it all.

We all know that Drupal is an amazing framework for building the next generation of web and mobile applications. Unfortunately, the rest of the world does not know this...yet.

To fulfill its mission to “Communicate the benefits of the Drupal software,” the Drupal Association is launching a new Marketing and Branding Committee to collaborate on the creation of marketing materials and tell the world about our amazing project and community. Having a marketing committee inside the Drupal Association means we can address, promote and support everything from DrupalCon to Drupal.org.

We are looking for members, volunteers and a chairperson for a new Marketing and Communication Committee.

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce a new Supporting Partner Program to allow a company to invest in Drupal Association community initiatives that will significantly help the overall Drupal community. Examples include funding for Drupal.org improvements, including the recent sprint that started the upgrade process of Drupal.org to Drupal 7, and hiring a web development team to make improvements on Drupal.org for web developers, site builders and businesses.  

There's a new initiative in the wind to upgrade our own Drupal.org site to version 7, and look out, its flying on its own!

Program Seeks to bolster community education and growth with new process

Building on a successful 2011 pilot program, the Drupal Association is opening a new application process for Drupal Community Cultivation Grants. The grants will assist organizers and leaders within the community that seek to transform, support, and educate Drupal communities around the world. The 2011 program awarded more than $20,000 to 17 projects all over the world in support of camps, training, sprints and a publication.

Welcome to the first edition of drupal.org team weekly notes - regular updates on what is happening at the drupal.org development land, what we've been working on and how you can participate and help us make drupal.org a better place. (Actually these updates will be posted once per 2 weeks, but bi-weekly notes sounds not so cool!)

Drupal 7 upgrade

As you might have heard, our biggest and most important project right now is Drupal.org upgrade to Drupal 7. On the week of April 23 we've had an upgrade planning sprint, sponsored by Drupal Association.