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.

Organization and User Profile Improvements

Explicit Attribution Option for ‘I am A Volunteer’

As a part of our effort to recognize individual contributions to the Drupal ecosystem we’ve slightly adjusted the options available to a user when making an attribution in the issue queues. Instead of simply assuming that a comment made without an attribution to an organization or customer is done by a volunteer - we now allow volunteers to explicitly mark their work as such. Requiring a positive affirmation of the volunteer attribution should improve the accuracy of the data we are gathering about the Drupal ecosystem.

This now means a user can make issue comment attributions in the following ways:

  1. Without attribution
  2. As a volunteer
  3. On behalf of an organization and/or customer
  4. Both as a volunteer and on behalf of an organization and/or customer.

We are seeing a rate of around 30% of issue comments attributed to an organization, customer or as volunteer work. We hope to see that rate increase steadily.

To date, there have also been over 7,000 issue credits that have been awarded to over 2,300 users and 175 organizations. We are looking forward to displaying these credits on user and organization profiles in the month of June and beginning to find new ways to reward our top contributors.

Content Strategy and Visual Design System for Drupal.org

Our collaboration with Forum One on developing content strategy for Drupal.org finished a few weeks ago. While recommendations were published in the issue queues earlier, we decided to use DrupalCon Los Angeles as an opportunity to present the work done and future plans in more detail, and get direct feedback from community members. Check out session slides or video if you want to know more on proposed changes to Drupal.org IA and content strategy.

Right now we are working on a few preparations steps before we can start implementing the changes. The first one of those steps would be a card sort exercise to validate our proposed IA and navigation with Drupal.org users. More blog posts and issues will follow as we move further.

Issue Workflow and Git Improvements

The Drupal Association has been preparing a plan for a new issue workflow on Drupal.org - with some very exciting improvements planned to create a workflow that is both familiar to other repository hosts and yet unique to the needs of the Drupal community.

Perhaps the greatest value of the new Git workflow will be the presence of per-issue repositories and pull requests on Drupal.org issues without forking the issue conversations. Drupal.org will use git namespaces to provide every developer working on an issue with their own branch. Developers will be able to pull in the latest changes from HEAD, or changes from other users’ branches. Drupal.org will be able to summarize the commits, take the changeset and run tests, and help maintainers manage the merge process to push changes upstream.

This architecture will make additional features possible as well:

  • The patch based workflow will continue to work - behind the scenes Drupal.org will create commits on namespaced branches from these patches so that these code contributions will be first-class citizens with the new git workflow.
  • We will be able to provide an inline editor for code in issues - simplifying the workflow for contributions such as code style fixes, documentation, quick typo corrections, etc.
  • We can provide the option to compare any two changes in an issue, giving us automated interdiff functionality.
  • We can identify merge conflicts across issues - to hopefully prevent conflicts across issues before they become too deeply entangled.

This planning work culminated in a presentation at DrupalCon Los Angeles - where the community provided some great feedback, and dove into help us with some architectural components during the extended sprints.

Implementation of the new Issue Workspaces architecture will certainly take some time - but we’re excited to have a plan to work from as we move forward.

Community Initiatives

Two Factor Authentication

May saw the initial roll out of Two-Factor Authentication on Drupal.org. Users with elevated privileges on Drupal.org now have the option of enabling TFA, and this may become required for all elevated roles in future.

Next we want to make two factor available to all authenticated users on Drupal.org. However, before we can allow every user to enable two factor it is important that we create a support policy for resetting accounts with TFA enabled, which is still under discussion.

DrupalCI

DrupalCon Los Angeles was a great opportunity to meet with the community and talk about the current state of DrupalCI, and it’s upcoming release.

As of the end of May, DrupalCI is very close to being ready for integration on Drupal.org. All of the environments requested for the MVP deployment are functional, and the Drupal Association staff is getting ready to demo the integration with Drupal.org on a development site - at the same time work is continuing on the results site componenet and the test-runner’s results publishing capabilities.

DrupalCI will be rolled out in parallel with the existing PIFT/PIFR infrastructure for at least a few months following initial deployment as a sanity check.

Localize.Drupal.org

Click-testing has identified several additional issues going into the end of May, and the Association team continues to work on knocking the issues down as they appear. When the current set of identified issues is resolved, we intend to notify the most active translation groups and ask them to perform a final round of testing on the staging environment.

When any issues from that final round of testing are resolved, we will deploy the D7 version of Localize.drupal.org.

Revenue-related projects (funding our work)

DrupalCons

DrupalCon Los Angeles was a productive and fun event for the community and the Association staff - in every way a success. At the conference we made several announcements about the upcoming DrupalCons, including 2016 locations.

First, we announced the opening of the call for papers for DrupalCon Barcelona, September 21st-25th. The call for papers for Barcelona closes on June 8th.

We then announced our next two conferences, and launched their websites.
DrupalCon Asia will be held in Mumbai in February of 2016.

And the next DrupalCon North America will be held on May 9th-13th, 2016 in New Orleans!

Sustaining Support and Maintenance

The Git servers replacing our existing Git infrastructure are nearly ready for thorough testing and deployment. These servers give us a highly available cluster for git.drupal.org, in addition to increased storage capacity, a newer operating system, and dedicated hardware for Git services on Drupal.org.

Our Fastly CDN deployment for downloads (ftp.drupal.org) was a success, and soon to follow is the same new architecture for updates traffic (updates.drupal.org). This new architecture uses dynamic purging to reduce the number of update requests served by our origin servers. It also decreases the latency between packaging a release and serving the update data from a number of minutes to a few seconds.

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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.