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.

Many of the most important features are already available such as search, or improvements to the project module. In order to get the redesign completed we've reviewed the design and identified the minimum viable product for drupal.org.

A minimum viable product for Drupal.org means deciding what are the most essential parts of drupal.org that will go live when the design is refreshed. It also means defining what will be finished off after the initial launch. The remaining features will be designed and prioritized based on feedback from people who visit the site.

To understand how we selected the minimum viable product it is important to revisit the intent of the redesign and understand the motivations of the people who use drupal.org. The most important motivations were:

1. getting access to specific information
2. monitoring issues
3. continuing conversations

The minimum viable product must have the most important user journeys re-designed. For 'new users', they consider the movement from Home to About/Why Choose Drupal and/or or Get Started the most important user journey. So we must have those sections of the site done. For ‘existing’ users the primary user journeys are to specific content via search/search results and to monitor content/issues/discussions/news etc. In the redesigned site this navigation will be done via the dashboard. The dashboard must have this basic navigation for the minimum viable product. Currently, existing drupal.org users use bookmarks, and they use the URLs which they have memorized to navigate around drupal.org.

If you want to review the motivations for the minimum viable product please read the re-design post about new users and existing users, and insights into the drupal.org design strategies.

We also wanted to take a more analytic approach and review the most common paths. We turned to Google analytics and reviewed two reports, the Top Content Detail Path report and the top content detail navigation report. This gave us 50 paths to review to ensure the new site worked before we launched the redesign.

What needs to be done:

The design deliverables from Mark Boulton Design lists approximately 25 landing pages. Many of those pages are quite complex and need both custom programming, additional theming, and content. To help get these pages done, we've evaluated the complexity of these landing pages 1(easy) through 3 (complex).

We are also asking Drupal development firms to step forward and sponsor a page. For each page, we request that a rough evaluation be started by Dec 1st, and a goal of completion by Jan 15th.If you are interested in sponsoring a page, please contact us using the "Implement part of the drupal.org redesign" category.

We have two project managers who will be helping to coordinate the efforts. They are myself, and Lisa Rex. The project managers will work with the contributing development shops and the existing contributors to the redesign to help it be completed. We also will work with Dries to coordinate how drupal.org will evolve.

We have also recruited a new redesign infrastructure team that has been managing and updating our ten development and staging sites. We are still recruiting administrators for that effort and I'll blog more about the progress we are making soon.