By now you’ve noticed that Drupal.org looks a little different! To understand why these design changes were made it may be helpful to read the redesign user experience research lead Leisa Reichelt’s post Why is it so? Some insights into our design strategy. Here’s what’s new on Drupal.org:

Homepage

Last month Drupal.org had over 2 million unique visitors, many of them coming to the home page to learn about and evaluate Drupal. The home page was designed with these visitors in mind. Our UX research revealed that Drupal.org is primarily a searching site, so the home page features a large search box with optional search filters. The rest of the home page focuses on the needs of Drupal evaluators, including a section showcasing the newest and best Drupal sites.

The home page also shows stats and Drupal community activity. The world map indicates the worldwide breadth of the Drupal community’s recent code commits, updates to documentation and more. A post detailing the map implementation will be posted in the near future.

Dashboard

Update: Drupal 7.0 Beta 3 is available now!

Our last Drupal 7 beta version was released about a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the second (and possibly final!) beta version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

This release includes:

• Better error trapping during installation and upgrade for various incompatible systems, based on error reports from folks newly trying out Drupal 7 on various environments. We think we've caught all the ones we have so far, but please keep the reports coming!
• Better support for exportables in the form of a new Form API type "machine_name" and format IDs stored as strings rather than integers.
• Links can now participate in the D7 AJAX framework, which was previously limited to forms.
• Raised minimum version of PHP to PHP 5.2.4, to facilitate stream wrapper security.
• Numerous tweaks to basic navigation in the default profile, to prevent information overload.
• Fixed a regression in Schema API that prevented modules such as Date from adding to the column types supported by core.
• Profile module no longer shows up on the module listing on new sites, in favour of fieldable user entities.
• Fixing of numerous Bartik and Seven theme style & RTL bugs. There are still lots more, so please help get Drupal 7's new look and feel as polished as possible!

When will beta become RC?

Beta will become RC when we have zero critical issues remaining. The count is currently at 5. We're seemingly very close, but we need your help to ensure we've caught all the nasty bugs before our first release candidate.

Additionally, RC1 signals a hard string freeze so if you have issues in the queue that impact user interface text, wrap them up soon! Please tag issues with "string freeze" if they need to be committed before RC1.

Updating from previous versions

The 7.x-beta1 => 7.x-beta2 upgrade path should work. Please tell us if it doesn't. (Remember to search first!)

Always make backups of your data and never do testing on your live site to make sure you keep all of your information intact even if something goes wrong.

Metabolife, based in San Diego, manufactures and distributes weight-loss dietary supplements throughout the U.S. To stand out in this crowded market, Metabolife needed to transform itself from a simple weight-loss product into a brand that supported people as they tried to make themselves more healthy. They decided to give their site a fresh design and offer a whole new set of interactive tools.

Design and development shop ISL Consulting of San Francisco partnered with ClearMetrics, a New York digital agency, on this project. ISL and ClearMetrics are sister companies, with ISL focused on engineering and theming and ClearMetrics on marketing and campaign management. Together we decided that the best way forward was to create a social business site that promoted Metabolife’s wellness brand by letting customers form a community to support one another in their pursuit of healthy lifestyles.

We chose to re-design Metabolife’s site with Drupal because Drupal offers multiple community features and allows for easy integration of Flash (and other) applications. The new site would support the company’s brand goals by allowing users to access online health-promotion tools and giving them the ability and incentive to interact with the site through Facebook. The site would also integrate an Ubercart e-commerce platform that would tap into users’ social interactions to drive sales.

Packt Publishing, the company behind many well-known Drupal books, is also responsible for the Open Source Awards, an annual online event held to distinguish excellence among open source projects. Winners of this competition receive cash awards that go to support their projects. Over the past five years, Drupal has won thousands of dollars in award competitions sponsored by Packt, due in no small part to the strength and passion of our community.

This year, Drupal is up against historic rivals Joomla! and WordPress in the Hall of Fame CMS category. The winning project will receive $2,500.

How can you help make Drupal win? Just go to Packt’s site and cast your vote. But don’t delay, as the competition is only open until November 5.

Packt is also giving away a free Amazon Kindle to a randomly selected voter. Help support Drupal by voting today!

The drupal.org redesign team is looking for people to help perform Quality Assurance (QA) testing of beta.drupal.org. We have been working on redesigning Drupal.org and are nearing the first launch. Some details still need work, and we need your help to find and fix them.

Major revisions will likely not be included in this first launch; however, drupal.org is a community effort that is continually evolving. We want your feedback, and we want you to help continue to make our home better. There are opportunities for people of all skills to help us identify or fix problems.

Bill O'Connor (csevb10) and Neil Drumm (drumm) are leading the QA effort and can be reached in #drupal-redesign on IRC or in the redesign issue queue.

We need help with functional testing and cross-browser/platform theme testing. We will be periodically pushing changes, so the community will see progress on resolving issues.

Note: If you never used an "@drupal.org" login to a site then you can gleefully ignore this post. It was a feature launched long ago and not widely used.

Hey Everybody,

It's been a long time coming, but we are now approaching the point where the old "distributed authentication" mechanism will be turned off on drupal.org.

For a while, the distributed authentication method was a great idea. Sites like spreadfirefox.com used the distributed authentication and it helped spread awareness of Drupal. It was an early idea for identity and federated websites and distributed social and all those fancy buzzwords.

But while the concept might have been visionary the implementation was not. It is not a super secure architecture, as perhaps the biggest complaint.

So, we will turn it off on drupal.org on November 1st, 2010.