Drupal's home hasn't always been a nice place to visit. The objective of the redesign was to make Drupal.org more inviting and representative of how amazing Drupal is. Updating the look and feel of Drupal.org was important for appealing to new users as well as making the site more usable for its current community.
The effort to redesign drupal.org began in August, 2005 at the OSCON Drupal meet-up. Drupal.org needed a great design and the community set out to create the Drupal Association and raise money for two years to hire a design firm.
In late 2007, the Drupal Association kicked off the design firm hiring process. At DrupalCon Boston in March 2008, the Association committed that redesigning Drupal.org was it's number one priority.
By late 2008 the community kicked off a series of six in person sprints to implement the redesign. By Fall 2009 we moved from in person sprints to an online collaborative implementation process by recruiting volunteers from the community.
At DrupalCon San Francisco in 2010, the Drupal Association acknowledged the depth and complexity of the implementation effort and committed to hire a team to remove some of the technical hurdles that prevented the community from completing the redesign. The Association redesign implementation team lead by volunteers and in collaboration with the community volunteers led the redesign to this phase one completion.
The Drupal.org redesign is continuing based upon feedback, user analytics and feature requests. The redesign went through eleven community-led iterations based upon goals to improve usability for established developers and the user experience of those exploring Drupal.org for the first time.
To find out more about the Drupal.org redesign, visit these great resources documenting teh decision and development process:
