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.

A community consultation process drew together a list of issues, ideas and outright wishes that might help achieve the goal of improving Drupal.org. We set up ideascale to quickly help rank and sort through those ideas. It became apparent that step one was migrating Drupal.org to Drupal 7, because fixing some of the issues we faced for our existing Drupal 6 platform didn't make sense.

Most (approximately $9,000) of the T-shirt funds were used to facilitate a Drupal 7 upgrade project kick off sprint held in Portland at the Oregon State University offices. The money was spent on travel and accommodation to ensure all the major contributors could get together to plan, design and embark on the challenges behind "Making Drupal.org Awesome".

Portland Sprint Team:

  • Drupal Customizations team: Neil 'drumm' Drumm, Angie 'webchick' Byron, Dylan Tack
  • Infrastructure team: Narayan 'nnewton' Newton, Lance Albertson, Rudy Grigar, David Strauss, William 'csevb10' O'Connor (solr lead)
  • Project*: Derek 'dww' Wright, Chad 'hunmonk' Phillips, Michael Prasuhn, Brandon 'bdragon' Bergren, Jonathan 'jhedstom' Hedstrom, Karoly 'chx' Negyesi, Diana Dupuis
  • Git*: Sam 'sdboyer' Boyer, Marco 'marvil07' Villegas, Michael 'hlstd' Halstead, Howard 'tizzo' Tyson, Melissa 'eliza411' Anderson
  • Bluecheese Theme team: Joel 'banghouse' Moore, Chris 'rupl' Ruppel, Lewis Nyman

For more details on the sprint, see https://association.drupal.org/node/16028. Our goal is to get the entire site upgraded to Drupal 7 by DrupalCon Munich! HUGE thanks to Four Kitchens, 3281d Consulting, Tag1 Consulting, and Transparatech for their assistance in helping us reach this goal!

Metal Toad put a video together about the sprint

In addition to Neil "drumm" Drumm, who has most of his full-time attention allocated to Drupal.org, two new people have also been hired part-time to work directly on Drupal.org: Tatiana "tvn" is the Drupal.org Project Coordinator (for all drupal.org-related initiatives), and Joel "Senpai" Farris is the project manager for the Drupal.org D7 Upgrade initiative.

It's been two months since we kicked off the D7 Upgrade process. Drupal.org's upgrade path is particularly hairy since it actively supports the development efforts of over 18,000 contributors and runs a lot of custom code to perform this feat.

Progress Summary

  • Set up "real" staging enviroments for Continuous Integration testing of the migration.
  • Performance testing environment for infrastructure to help us measure and squash any performance regressions.
  • Drupal.org is now able to complete the D6 => D7 upgrade via update.php without failures thanks to a few fixes that have also been contributed back upstream for all Drupal users.
  • Project module has been rewritten using modern Drupal 7 approaches including Fields and Entities. Download the installation profile at http://drupal.org/project/projectinstall to try it out. (this distribution profile is lagging behind on a weekly basis due to the progress being made, so please be aware that it may not be all the way up-to-speed)
  • Responsive-friendly design prototypes for the Drupal.org Bluecheese theme have been created in order to measure the approach that will most easily satisfy our future mobile needs. Several base themes have been prototyped, as well as a custom Sass+Compass+Susy solution which is also a direct port of the original theme. The desicion has been made to forego a base theme in favor of the latter method.
  • Drupal 7 ports of Git infrastructure supporting modules, and preparation work done on deploying various Drupal 6 features waiting on the wings, such as the ability for project authors to specify a default branch for git clone.
  • Solr progress is stalled out completely, and won't make the launch deadlines unless we get some other people interested. Word on the street is that Drupal Dev Days in Barcelona this coming weekend has a few good people who are planning on sprinting, so there's still hope.
  • Plumbing for project-specific metrics has been deployed, hopefully with some nice stats and sparkline graphs to show off very soon! http://metrics-drupal.redesign.devdrupal.org/project/ctools
  • Numerous improvements to the existing Drupal 6 site in order to prepare it for upgrade, such as salting password hashes, upgrading to Views 6.x-3.x and PHP 5.3.

Where to from here? There's still some funds from the T-shirt drive available. These will fund another sprint this coming July, the details of which are still being discussed, but stay tuned for more news on that when the time comes.

More news for the curious can be found here: