Look for links to our Strategic Roadmap highlighting how this work falls into our priorities set by the Drupal Association Board and Drupal.org Working Groups.

Drupal 8 is here!

Drupal 8 was released on November 19th to a tremendous, worldwide celebration.

It was the culmination of an astounding effort by the community, and to support the big day the Drupal Association was ready with some new features and surprises for Drupal.org.

The Drupal.org Roadmap

New Features on Drupal.org

All of the tremendous energy around Drupal 8's release was definitely felt here at the Drupal Association in November. Release day was an opportunity for us to showcase some great new features on Drupal.org.

Firstly, we created a new landing page for the Drupal 8 release at http://drupal.org/8. Not only is this landing page beautiful, and functional - it also promotes the best of Drupal using some new features that preview what's to come for the best of Drupal.org.

The new landing page is built as a Section, according to the content model we're using to govern how content will be curated across Drupal.org. A more modern, minimal banner previews a more contemporary look for Drupal.org as we prepare a new pattern library. We've also enabled translation tools for content on Drupal.org, starting with critical sections like the Drupal 8 release pages, which allowed us to have over 25 translations of the release landing page on release day (with many more added since). We are not enabling translations on all Drupal.org content, but focusing on specific areas of content that are critical to promoting the project - curated by staff.

We also updated the Case Studies page with a new filter to highlight case studies by Drupal version - allowing the community to show off the best Drupal 8 sites that are already in the wild today.

Finally, we updated the download experience for users coming to download Drupal. Up to this point the download experience on Drupal.org left a lot to be desired. The most glaring issue was that there was no clarity for the layperson around what version to download, how they could just try the software out, and what to do next after downloading.

We've released a first iteration that dramatically improves these areas- and we're going to continue to make some changes to help improve that first impression new users get when they come to download Drupal.

Support for Translating Contrib

We would like to say a special thanks to u/herom and u/gábor-hojtsy for their work on https://localize.drupal.org to improve support for translating Contrib modules in Drupal 8. The Association provided development environments for testing and code review, but much of the heavy lifting was done by these members of the community. Thank you!

Content Strategy

The Documentation Section

While much of our engineering time in November was spent on tasks to support Drupal 8's release - the documentation section is still the next major section we will implement on Drupal.org. The Drupal 8 landing page was also implemented as part of the About section of Drupal.org, according to the outline set out by our Content Strategy, and that helped us to identify some additional features we still need to sort out for all of our new sections.

We've also continued to collect your feedback from the survey on documentation pages on Drupal.org, and will be reviewing that as we continue to build this section out.

DrupalCI

Now that DrupalCI has been in production for several months, Association time spent on active development is beginning to wind down. We're focusing our ongoing work on maintenance, clean up tasks, and some feature requests.

In November the team finished modifying the DrupalCI stack to help prevent cost overruns caused by too many simultaneous test requests. We also implemented PHP syntax linting.

We will also soon disable legacy testing for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, and statically archive http://qa.drupal.org. (We have been ready to do this for some weeks, but have needed to find a good deployment window to make the final switchover.)

Planning Better Composer Support

Composer is an increasingly essential part of any PHP developer's workflow, and Drupal 8 brings the project much closer to a place where Composer can be used for Drupal projects. In November, we worked with the community to find a path forward for composer on Drupal.org, and began outlining the issues that will need to be resolved to accommodate a more robust composer workflow for Drupal installations.

As the bulk of the work for the DrupalCI initiative has wound down, this will be one of the next major initiatives that the Association will undertake, and just as with DrupalCI, we'll be working closely with the community to find the right solutions for Drupal.org.

Coming Soon: A Better Community Initiatives Process

One of the biggest challenges of being a small non-profit that works with a very large community is finding a way to embrace community contributions to Drupal.org while maintaining the integrity of the prioritization process and product vision for Drupal.org. Drupal the software is built by a wonderful global community, and some of those community members also want to give back to Drupal.org itself - and that process hasn't always been easy.

Well, one of our New Year's resolutions at the Association is to make this process better. We've been working with the Working Groups and the Association board to develop a process for community initiatives that provides greater transparency to the community, better respects contributors time, and helps to integrate community priorities into our greater roadmap.

This new process isn't quite ready to share, but we wanted to let you know that it will be coming soon!

Sustaining support and maintenance

Fastly for a Faster Drupal.org

Drupal.org first started using Fastly as a CDN to server our FTP traffic back in February of 2015. Since then we've been impressed by the quality of their service, the ease of configuration management for our CDN settings using varnish VCLs, and their responsiveness and commitment to the Drupal Community. In November, we completed migration of all of our CDN needs to Fastly - and Fastly now fronts all content and file delivery for Drupal.org.

Drupal Association Membership Campaign Continues!

Last, but not least, our membership drive on Drupal.org continues through the end of the year. If you are not yet a member of the Drupal Association we are asking for your support, and asking existing members to share the campaign.

The campaign has also taught us how we can better highlight our community contributors. Some of the most wonderful members of the Drupal community stepped forward to tell their stories - and we think we can bring those stories to the front page - so look forward to seeing more of them soon!

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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all volunteers who are working with us and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects.

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra