What’s new on Drupal.org? - November 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 engineering team at the Drupal Association had much to be thankful for in November. With the support of the wonderful volunteers in our community and the contributions of our Supporting Partners we were able to deliver some great tools for the project. Let's dive and see what's new.

Drupal.org updates

Promoting Drupal by Industry

In November we finished the technical scaffolding for the upcoming industry pages, and began working with the wider Association team on content development for these pages. Because we were ahead of our internal targets for this page and we felt it would add significant value, we've also added the ability to geotarget content on these industry pages.

This is the first instance of geo-targeting on Drupal.org, and we'll be using it to help connect Drupal evaluators with regionally appropriate content and partners on these pages. Work on the industry pages is ongoing, but we're excited to bring them to you soon.

Developer Tools Evaluation

During November the engineering team also had a two day retreat here in Portland, OR with webchick - one of the members of the Technical Advisory Committee. We used this retreat to do a deep dive into the current state of developer tools on Drupal.org, and to evaluate our options to continue evolving the tools we offer to the community.

We gave a summary of our exploration along with some next steps to the Drupal Association Board on November 22nd. You can find the minutes and a recording here.

Core release packaged with --no-dev composer dependencies

Starting with the Drupal 8.2.3 release, we are now packaging full releases of Drupal core with --no-dev composer dependencies. This means that packages downloaded will not include extraneous developer extras that should not be used in production sites, and that the release packages will be smaller. We will continue to package dev releases with the dev dependencies.

Feature branch testing support

Drupal.org allows maintainers to create feature branches for issues by using the name format [issue#]-[short-description]. Any commits made to a branch in this format will appear in the sidebar of the associated issue. To improve the utility of these feature branches, DrupalCI patch file tests now also run on push to these branches.

To add tests, users can simply click on the 'add test' link beneath the git branch in the issue sidebar, or click on the existing test result bubble to re-test or add a new test. Since this feature was introduced we've run over 200 issue branch tests.

Project maintainers can add Documentation Guides

We're continuing to support the migration of documentation to the new documentation system, and we've now enabled Project Maintainers to add related documentation guides to their projects. Once added, the related projects will appear on the documentation guides, in the sidebar.

Documentation Maintainers can find their Guides

Many community volunteers have stepped up to become maintainers of the new documentation guides. We want to make sure we're giving them the tools they need to do the work of maintaining those guides and the pages within them.

We've added a 'Your Guides' section to the user profile which will list all of the guides that a user maintains, as well as the pages within those guides. This should allow maintainers to see when pages have been recently changed or added, and to easily keep their guide content curated and up to date.

Infrastructure

Virtualization and Improved Config Management

In November, we completed the majority of two major infrastructure projects. Firstly, we've virtualized the majority of the infrastructure and standardized on Debian 8 images. Secondly we've updated our configuration and user management from Puppet 3 + LDAP to Puppet 4 + Hiera. This is a significant milestone for our infrastructure, and gives us a more portable and maintainable infrastructure to manage moving forwards.

Community Initiatives

Community initiatives are a collaboration; with dedicated community volunteers building improvements to Drupal.org with the architectural guidance and oversight of the Drupal Association engineering team.

Drupal 8 User Guide Launched!

We're very happy to say that the Drupal 8 User Guide is now live on Drupal.org! This documentation guide is carefully curated to provide all the information a new user needs to become skilled at managing a Drupal 8 site. We want to give a special thanks to jhodgdon for all her work on the User Guide project.

Initiatives need your help

Are you a Drupal.org power user who relies on Dreditor? Markcarver, who is currently leading the charge to port Dreditor features to Drupal.org, has invited anyone interested in contributing to join him in #dreditor on freenode IRC or the Dreditor GitHub.

Is the written word your domain? Consider putting your skills to use by becoming a maintainer of Drupal documentation. If you are a developer interested in contributing code to the new documentation system, please contact tvn.

———

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