What’s new on Drupal.org? - May 2016

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.

The team is back from New Orleans and thankful for the time we had to spend with the community, attending sessions, presenting sessions of our own, and sprinting with you throughout the Con. As individuals, we’re all members of the community, and as an organization we're proud to hold the home of the community in trust.

Because of DrupalCon North America, May is always a busy month for the Association engineering team. We're preparing our sessions, ensuring that the testbots will be running smoothly for DrupalCon sprints, and polishing new features and ideas to share with the community. Here's what's new:

Drupal.org updates

Composer repositories moving towards stable

At the end of April, we launched the Alpha of our Composer façade, providing Composer repository endpoints on Drupal.org for Drupal 8 and Drupal 7. At DrupalCon New Orleans, we gave a presentation on the architecture of the Composer façade, and our plans for next steps. We also received some great feedback from users who helped us test the alpha release, and in May we've focused on moving Composer from an alpha release to a more stable environment suitable for use on production Drupal sites. We'll be following up soon with a more detailed blog post about Composer, when that more stable release is available.

If you want to help test the Composer service, you can learn more about Drupal.org's Composer repositories.

New documentation content types

As previewed in our session at DrupalCon New Orleans, we're modernizing Drupal documentation with two new content types: Guides, and Documentation Pages. Documentation Pages will be organized in Guides, which will be curated by maintainers. We're also bringing a new visual design to documentation, re-organizing documentation by major version of Drupal, and developing a call-outs feature to help highlight key information like best practices or important changes in minor versions.

In May, we made an initial deployment of these content types to Drupal.org, though access is presently restricted to administrators while we work with the Documentation Working Group to sort out our initial migration plan. In June, we hope to deploy a migration tool, allowing users to convert existing documentation Book Pages and their children into the new Guides and Documentation Pages.

CKEditor

We've also deployed CKEditor to Drupal.org. The WYSIWYG editor is now available on the Section, Page, and Post content types, as well as the incoming Documentation Guide and Documentation Page types. CKEditor brings a more robust editorial experience to Drupal.org, and as it gets wider use we’ll expand it to additional content types. We also want to allow time for the Dreditor maintainers to update to support the change. As a long-term goal, we hope that some of the features of Dreditor may be reimplemented as CKEditor plugins and directly available to every Drupal.org user without the use of a 3rd party browser extension.

Sustaining support and maintenance

DrupalCon Dublin full site launched

At DrupalCon New Orleans, we launched the full site for DrupalCon Dublin. The call for papers is open now, as is registration, so submit your sessions and purchase your tickets soon. DrupalCon New Orleans had the most sessions submissions ever for a DrupalCon, and the standard of quality was incredibly high. We're hoping that DrupalCon Dublin will see just as many wonderful submissions.

DrupalCon Baltimore announced!

As is tradition, we also revealed the location of the next DrupalCon North America. In 2017, DrupalCon will be in Baltimore! At the closing session, the engineering team launched the splash page for the upcoming event, with travel information, hotels, and important dates.

And if your organization would like to sponsor DrupalCon Baltimore, you can find more information and our prospectus on the site as well.

Infrastructure

We made several tweaks to Drupal.org infrastructure in May as well. We updated the Git Twisted daemon, which serves as the backend for the Drupal.org Git repositories and packaging process. We rebuilt our staging infrastructure at OSU/OSL. And finally, with the generous support of new Technology Supporting Partner OpsGenie, we updated our internal pager rotation for infrastructure alerts.

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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.

We also want to say a special thanks to the departing leadership team at the Drupal Association: our former executive director, Holly Ross, who is moving on after building an incredible team and a great culture throughout the entire organization; Matt Tsugawa, our CFO; and Josh Mitchell, who has lead and mentored the engineering team.

Megan Sanicki, our former COO, is taking on the mantle of Executive Director and we're looking forward to where her leadership will take us

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