Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

In January the Drupal Association kicked off the new year with our Winter Staff Retreat, where the whole organization came together to review the past 6 months and lay out our strategy for the new year. In addition to taking a big picture look at our upcoming priorities, we also made some great improvements this past month.

Before we dive into those, we'd like to welcome Dhanya Girish to the Drupal Association team. Her time has been generously sponsored by Zyxware and she joins us as a skilled engineer. Please welcome Dhanya!

Drupal.org Updates

Celebrating Drupal's 17th Birthday

To celebrate the 17th birthday of Drupal, we've embedded a wonderful video on the home page, celebrating some of the incredible things that have been built with Drupal. Drupal has grown from being a dorm-room experiment to being the driver for some of the most powerful digital experiences on the web. We can't wait to see what the next 17 years bring.

Proposed new initiatives for collaboration with Core

The Drupal Association engineering team meets monthly with the Drupal Core committers to align our goals and ensure that we're on the same page about what the project needs moving forward. At the beginning of this year we outlined some new proposed initiatives that, in collaboration with Core, we believe could be a tremendous value to the project.

None of these initiatives can be accomplished quickly, nor can they be moved forward without the collaboration of key contributors and the core committers, but we strongly believe they will be important next steps for the future of Drupal.

Refresh of the Hosting Listings program

A major focus in January was the refresh of our hosting listings program. The new hosting listings now display all providers on the primary view, with a series of filters to help users find exactly the right hosting partner. This update also brings a much needed visual refresh to the listings. New filters and search facets will help end-users find the hosting partner that is right for their needs, industry, and budget, and will enable users to identify and support those platforms that support the project.

Promoting industry solutions in the marketplace

Over the last year, we've been focused on pushing a message about crafting the perfect solution for particular industries with Drupal. We link to this information off of the front page, but we've also added a contextual block in the sidebar that will appear whenever users filter the marketplace by the relevant industry.

These efforts are an ongoing part of better serving the various personas who come to Drupal.org. Look forward to hearing about even more changes on this front as we approach DrupalCon Nashville in April.

In-context issue tag explanations

One of the cornerstones of Drupal.org contribution and issue management is our issue tagging system. However, it's been difficult in the past to understand what each tag is used for, especially for tags that are carefully monitored and curated by project maintainers or the core committer team. We've enhanced the tagging system by providing in-context hover-states that describe what tags are used for.

Infrastructure Updates

Implemented PerimeterX for increased protection from DDOS, crawlers, badbots etc.

Would you believe that Drupal.org is the target of a bad crawler or outright DDOS attack at least once every two months? The team does an incredible job reducing the impact on end users of Drupal.org, but to make that job easier, we've partnered with PerimeterX for bad bot protection integrated with our CDN. PerimeterX integrates closely with Fastly, our CDN, and so can provide intelligent logic and protection at the edge.

We're starting off using this system simply for greater introspection into the nature of traffic patterns and the attacks of bad actors. We're gradually enabling the protection as we tune the system for Drupal.org's unique needs. We want to thank PerimeterX for supporting the project, and for helping to make Drupal.org a better place for our community.

DrupalCI: Support for yarn-based core tests

We've added a yarn build-step plugin to DrupalCI, allowing us to support new testing types, including nightwatch javascript tests in core and contrib. We want to provide a special thanks to community contributors who helped: justafish, dawhener, and mile23.

———

As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who make it possible for us to work on these projects. In particular we want to thank:

  • PerimeterX - *NEW* Signature Technology Supporting Partner
  • publicplan - *NEW* Premium Supporting Partner
  • WebEnertia - *NEW* Premium Supporting Partner
  • Electric Citizen - *NEW* Classic Supporting Partner
  • Factorial - *NEW* Classic Supporting Partner
  • One Shoe - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
  • DRUD - Renewing Classic Hosting Supporter

If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal Association.

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

Comments

Greg Boggs’s picture

Automatic updates are a  long time coming. And, if you don't want to wait, I wrote them as a  contrib in 2016 :)

https://github.com/thenewgroup/auto-updates