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 June the Drupal Association had our annual staff retreat, where the remote team members joined the Portland, OR team for a three day retreat. This year's retreat was particularly important as we found our feet as a smaller, leaner team, and focused on our organizational roadmap for the next twelve months.

For the engineering team in particular, our focus will be on maintaining the critical systems that make project successful: issue queues, updates, testing, packaging, etc, while at the same time finding new ways to support and enable Drupal's evolution.

These were some heady days, but even as we worked through the best ways to continue serving the Drupal community on a strategic level in June, we also found the time to keep making Drupal.org a better home.

Drupal.org updates

Documentation Migration

A long running initiative this year has been the creation of a new Documentation system for Drupal.org, a topic we've touched on in many prior updates as it has begun to come online. We are very happy to say that we are moving to the next stage of the documentation project: moving from development to migration.

In June tvn recruited several volunteers to join our documentation migration team, and to become some of the first maintainers for the new Documentation Guides. General documentation, such as Understanding Drupal, Structure Guide, etc. will be migrated first. Documentation for contributed projects will follow in the coming weeks.

Documentation Preview

Maintainers of contributed projects, who currently have their documentation on Drupal.org, will be added as maintainers to respective documentation guides and are encouraged to clean/tidy up their documentation post-migration.

if you are interested in helping, or sign up as a maintainer for some of the new documentation guides.

Composer Repositories are now in Beta

Drupal.org Composer Logo

Drupal.org's Composer repositories allow developers building sites with Drupal to use the Composer command line tool for dependency management. In June we collected feedback from a variety of users, as well as the community volunteers who assisted us with the Composer Community Initiative.

We spent the month iterating quickly on the alpha implementation: fixing bugs and rebuilding the meta data to ensure that users get consistent and expected results. Because of those fixes, and after gathering yet more feedback from the community, we were able to move the Drupal.org Composer repositories to beta.

We encourage you to begin transitioning your composer based workflows to use Drupal.org's composer facade. Package names are stable, and downtimes will be planned and announced. For more information on how to use Drupal.org's Composer repositories, read our documentation.

Better issue credit tools for maintainers

The Drupal.org issue credit system is a unique innovation of our community. By allowing users to attribute their contributions as volunteers, to their employers, or to client customers, we have an insight into the contribution ecosystem for Drupal that is unparalleled among open source projects. We've also already seen the impact of incentivizing organizations to give back to Drupal, by using the credit system as the basis for organization rankings in the marketplace.

Credit Others

Credit comment generated

In June we added two new tools for maintainers to improve how they grant credit to users. Firstly, maintainers can now deselect the automatic credit attribution for users who have submitted patches. This change was important to prevent gaming the credit system. Secondly, we've given the maintainers the ability to credit users who have not commented in the issue. Whether that help was provided in IRC, Slack, on a video call, or in a sprint room, maintainers can now ensure that those users who helped resolve an issue receive credit for their contributions. Any user who is credited this way can edit their credit attribution if they want to extend that attribution to a supporting organization or customer.

Friendly path aliases for release nodes

We also made a relatively small change that will have a big impact. Path auto is now enabled for project releases, so you for any project a specific release can now be found at:
drupal.org/project/[project_name]/releases/[version]
And you can also find a list of all the releases for a project at:
drupal.org/project/[project_name]/releases/

Take, for example, the Token module:
https://drupal.org/project/token/

You can find the complete index of releases for this project at: https://www.drupal.org/project/token/releases and individual releases now have friendly urls, like this one: https://www.drupal.org/project/token/releases/8.x-1.0-alpha2

Spam Fighting Improvements

Fighting spam on Drupal.org is a never ending battle, but in June we deployed a refinement to our spam fighting tools that helps us to find patterns in registration behavior and prevent spam registrations before they've even started. After flipping on our latest iteration of this spam fighting tool we saw an immediate and dramatic drop-off in suspicious account registrations. With the additional data we've been able to collect we already see ways to improve this even further, so we hope to continue make Drupal.org a cleaner home for the community.

Highlighting Supporting Technologies

Drupal is many things to many different people, but one central function of Drupal is to be the hub of interconnected and complementary technologies. Several of the companies that build these technologies have chosen to support the Drupal project by becoming supporters. To better highlight some of these supporting technologies that work well with Drupal, we've added a supporting technologies listing to the marketplace.

Sustaining support and maintenance

DrupalCon

DrupalCon Dublin Logo

DrupalCon Dublin is coming up soon, from September 26 - 30th. This year we smashed all our previous records for session submissions, and the caliber of speakers and topics is higher than ever before.

In June we opened registration for the event. We encourage you to buy your tickets now! Early bird registration will end soon.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is the bedrock of Drupal.org - and we're continuing to tune the infrastructure for efficiency, economy, and performance. Alongside the launch of registration for DrupalCon Dublin, we implemented APDQC to improve the performance of the Events website under heavy load.

We've also been upgrading our configuration management from Puppet 3 to Puppet 4, and continuing to standardize our configuration across all of our environments to make our infrastructure durable, consistent, and portable.

———

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

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

2pha’s picture

drupal.org/project/[project_name]/[version]

should be

drupal.org/project/[project_name]/releases/[version]

hestenet’s picture

Thanks for the correction! Updated.

--
Tim L
Drupal Association - CTO

m4olivei’s picture

Great updates, you guys are killing it! Thanks, and keep up the good work.

markconroy’s picture

Well done guys. Great to see all these improvements coming on board.

============

Drupal Core Maintainer for "Out of the Box" Initiative
Annertech - Web Agency of the Year.