Problem/Motivation

Currently, the Community section is a combination of:
- Information on how to contribute to Drupal
- Information on how to connect with the community
These two things are somewhat connected, of course, but really it's two different types of information that people are seeking in this section, and it's so disorganized and un-focused, it's hard to find either.

Proposed resolution

Separate the information currently under Community (including the Getting Involved Guide) into a Community section and a Contribute section. The Contribute section is being handled on related issue #1414988: [Meta/Plan] Create a new Getting Involved Guide section.

Content of the section

For the Community section, particularly, we want to have it cover:

  • How to find and talk to Drupal community
  • How to find Local and Interest User Groups
  • How to find Organizations
  • IRC, Slack, and Rocket chat
  • Forums?
  • Events: user group meetings, regional camps, DrupalCon
  • Community structure -- move the "Governance" and "Code of Conduct" sections (currently hidden in "About Drupal" and "Getting Involved Guide") into a new "Community Structure" book, modeled after the Ubuntu Community Structure page: http://community.ubuntu.com/community-structure/

Tone of the section

While doing this, we need to make sure this section:

  • Welcomes everyone, especially non-US audiences and people from our fastest-growing regions
  • Works for and appeals to non-developers as well as developers
  • Makes sure everyone feels that they are a valued part of the community
  • Doesn't assume everyone wants to contribute (time, money, or skills)
  • Fits all level personas: Newcomer, Learner, Skilled, Expert

Design of the landing page and sub-page

We may also want to include photos, which can be found at:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/1885072@N23/
https://www.flickr.com/groups/2382198@N24/pool/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/drupalassoc/
See also #1754728: Improve emotional response of d.o. by using images on landing pages

Layout ideas for the landing page:

Visibility

It would be really cool if in the future, as part of the on-boarding process, when a user signs up for a drupal.org account the email they get could:
- Point them to the new Contribute section (and Community section once that's done too)
- Link to videos about the benefits of connecting to the community and contributing
- Get a short list of ideas of where to start [although if the Contribute section is really good, maybe that would be a better place to go for this?]
- Then maybe after someone makes their first comment in a forum or on groups.drupal.org, we send a "Hey, thanks for commenting, here's some things you should know about how the community works" email

Remaining tasks

  1. Audit the current content of Community and Getting Involved -- this was done as part of #1414988: [Meta/Plan] Create a new Getting Involved Guide section and is currently residing in a spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vbIdtL-HAPK3bqiCamRIak048fcEqaWP...
  2. From that audit, take out the pages that should be in Community and put them under the Community section.
  3. Create the new Community Structure section (see Proposed Resolution)
  4. Create a landing page for the Community section that provides short descriptions of the various ways to connect to the community (see Proposed Resolution), and links to the appropriate pages
  5. Clean up, edit, and remove duplications in these pages

User interface changes

Better Community section that connects people with the community in various ways.

Support from Acquia helps fund testing for Drupal Acquia logo

Comments

lisarex’s picture

Subscribe :) The contributor survey will inform / validate a lot of decisions so while we should move forward, I think we should also be prepared to made adjustments based on #1289476: Research: Interview non-contributors to inform "getting involved" area.

tvn’s picture

subscribe

lisarex’s picture

I've posted an idea for photos of people in Drupal-related t-shirts which could be great for the Community page: http://groups.drupal.org/node/200923

For the events, I'm assuming it's showing upcoming events, but it might be good to allow filtering so they're more relevant to the visitor. US vs Europe vs ? I love the map idea but I'm not sure how hard that will be, with limited participation. I'm thinking we should design a page without a map, for now, or at least, a page that doesn't require any serious coding/customization.

heather’s picture

That is a great idea for t-shirt photos!

I think showing the international nature would be exciting and interesting. Also, what if there are no regional events where someone is visiting from Eritrea or Honduras?

It would be great though to have a comprehensive, sortable events list. The groups.drupal.org one is just missing a location/region filter. http://groups.drupal.org/events

Even if we want a local list, it would be good to get a change in more quickly. E.g., in the short term, if we could just get events up, and KISS it, it would be a massive improvement. Perhaps we can find a way to direct people to g.d.o to a localized event listing for them?

lisarex’s picture

Title: Create new top-level landing page for "Community" » Redesign top-level landing page for "Community"
Project: Drupal.org site moderators » Drupal.org content
Component: Redesign » Other
Status: Active » Needs work
Issue tags: +Usability
lisarex’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

removed placeholder text

eigentor’s picture

Heathers layout ideas look much more like actual landing pages and are in the spirit of what I meant #1754728: Improve emotional response of d.o. by using images on landing pages

YesCT’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

changing issue summary input format to filtered html, so people can comment and edit. doesn't seem to be that much custom html needed anyway. (Related: #2210789: Allow comments on issues even if user does not have permission for the issue summary text format)

YesCT’s picture

oh, an image was offsite. I downloaded it, and attached it, and embedded it.

mgifford’s picture

Thanks again @YesCT! Hope there aren't too many others.

I needed to augment this issue after reading the notes about Leisa Reichelt's presentation at DrupalCon London. I remember her Core Conversations presentation in Chicago, but that wasn't video taped that I know of. I need to watch from DrupalCon Chicago 2011 - From Usability to UX Strategy (March 8, 2011), Designing UI with Seven, & Design By Community: The Redesign of Drupal.org at some point.

Anyways, in DrupalCon London she hit on some very interesting points regarding the Community page that I thought was worth re-introducing here. As she said:

If you headed into Support and Community (which is probably the most sensible option) you’re hit with walls of text, no keywords that confirm that we want people like you and where you should go. Very little sign of a community at all, basically just a list of channels. It’s less than inspiring and a little intimidating.

  • IRC is not a solution – it scales badly, it’s intimidating and unfriendly if you’re new and unknown, and for a great swathe of us, it’s very unfamiliar.
  • Groups – try going there and logging out. This is also a pretty poor introduction to the community for newcomers.
  • Forums are also pretty haphazard and not really a recommended entry point.

Also, noted that there's a discussion about the community page on GDO:
https://groups.drupal.org/node/171419
https://groups.drupal.org/node/174999

And as a sub-page of the Drupal.org improvements handbook:
https://drupal.org/node/1289748

EDIT: Events (in other places) and IRC (which most folks find just way too geeky) really shouldn't be the top to items in the community.

mgifford’s picture

Issue tags: +maintain, +prairie
mgifford’s picture

Earlier GDO Post https://groups.drupal.org/node/136154

@leisareichelt or @tvn said:

We need to take another look at this section (http://drupal.org/community) - this was intended to be the doorway into the community for newcomers and it's really not doing the job at the moment (I'm allowed to say that, I mostly designed it wayback). It should make the issue queue visible (tho not be the 'home' of the issue queue - rather be the 'safe' entry point for people lacking in experience/confidence), it should provide supporting information re: making sense of the issue queue (acronym unscrambler, how work happens here, people you should know about perhaps? - there is a pretty average members directory that needs fixing or removing)

heather’s picture

Ah exciting to see action on this. sorry images were offsite. Glad they are fixed.

mgifford’s picture

Issue summary: View changes
mgifford’s picture

Issue summary: View changes
mgifford’s picture

I like photos from the Flickr The Drupal Project group

The ones that @lisarex recommended are good:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/elstudio/3655991498/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nidhug/5318758364/

But when trying to insert some photos here #1754728: Improve emotional response of d.o. by using images on landing pages it was hard to find some that fit this layout..

Maybe someone who was better at cropping things could make it work.

Anyways, let's keep this issue focused on the text and the related one I added as a related link focus on the images.

mgifford’s picture

Issue summary: View changes
FileSize
229.34 KB
mgifford’s picture

Any reason not to just insert a Flickr Badge into the drupalorg-community-new.tpl.php file that has this text?

<!-- Start of Flickr Badge -->
<style type="text/css">
#flickr_badge_source_txt {padding:0; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif; color:#666666;}
#flickr_badge_icon {display:block !important; margin:0 !important; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;}
#flickr_icon_td {padding:0 5px 0 0 !important;}
.flickr_badge_image {text-align:center !important;}
.flickr_badge_image img {border: 1px solid black !important;}
#flickr_www {display:block; padding:0 10px 0 10px !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#3993ff !important;}
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:hover,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:link,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:active,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:visited {text-decoration:none !important; background:inherit !important;color:#000000;}
#flickr_badge_wrapper {background-color:#ffffff;border: solid 1px #000000}
#flickr_badge_source {padding:0 !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#666666 !important;}
</style>
<table id="flickr_badge_uber_wrapper" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="10" border="0"><tr><td><a href="http://www.flickr.com" id="flickr_www">www.<strong style="color:#3993ff">flick<span style="color:#ff1c92">r</span></strong>.com</a><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="10" border="0" id="flickr_badge_wrapper">
<tr>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?count=3&display=random&size=m&layout=h&context=in%2Fpool-2382198%40N24%2F&source=group&group=2382198%40N24"></script>
</tr>
</table>
</td></tr></table>
<!-- End of Flickr Badge -->

I'm not sure where the map data, but I expect we could just leverage the same approach as the home page:

<div id="community-map">
      <div class="homepage-map"><?php print $map_content; ?></div>
</div>
mgifford’s picture

Other examples to look at. I think there were some on GDO too in the Prairie Initiative group:

http://community.joomla.org
http://make.wordpress.org/community
http://community.ubuntu.com
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/community

The team projects are quite interesting http://make.wordpress.org/community/team-projects/

new-tone’s picture

This is a larger resolution file that is in the comment below
Image!

new-tone’s picture

This is a mock-up for the Community Landing page. Images were taken from "Highlight Community by Featuring Photos from the Flickr Pool".
My concentration in this design is on the human aspect of Community. - PEOPLE
The banner area is an outline from a group photo from Flickr. This banner image establishes the community/group.
The large image of man and woman under the banner is demonstration of the community backing the individuals.
The "Blue Tinted" images represent the individuals of the community. Use of the color (blue) is to unify the banner, photo background and highlighted individuals.
Elements within images are separate files that can be added to any file with a simple background replacement.
I can explain the process of making images blue and retaining clarity if this idea moves forward.

Image!

mgifford’s picture

I like it! There's a more simple approach here #1754728: Improve emotional response of d.o. by using images on landing pages

Great to have the blue people on the left too.

BLadwin’s picture

The attached patch requires the CSS updates to bluecheese to be committed first in order for the markup and images to have the correct layout. binary images and their containing folder at 'drupalorg/drupalorg/images/community/' has been included in the patch; uploaded individual images for visual review.

BLadwin’s picture

cropped community_banner image so that body copy would show on initial page load.

Bojhan’s picture

Its great to see we are adding more emotional context to this page, this was definitely missing from that page. I see that there has already been a lot of discussion.

This is my review going from my knowedge working on Drupal.org the past few years. Although I really love our Drupal blue, we might be going a bit overboard with the images here. Although it is not documented it is common for us to use; bright, group pictures, without any major adjustments. An example of this is https://assoc.drupal.org/about

I chatted about this a little bit with Josh, BLadwin and Schnitzel and I'd like to offer the following suggestions:

1) Take a more natural looking top image that shows the community. For example a Drupalcon group picture. Schnitzel pointed to https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-foto/4923221504/in/set-72157624795590408/ for the header, and suggested we use photoshop to slightly brighten up the bottom of the image.

2) Adjusting the the top header of the page, seems a bit out of scope for this change and the proposed design has an adverse effect - making it more alien (because of the silothetes) rather than a positive emotion.

Frankly, I would also restrain from adding images in the left sidebar. They do not map to the content to the right, you will need more than 3 to map to all of the content (without causing wrapping) and adding them decreases the value of the top banner. Because instead of having one strong emotional image, you now have 5/6 on the same page.

My suggestions limit the scope, but should help increase the impact of the actual intend of this issue.

tvn’s picture

Issue tags: -maintain, -prairie +drupal.org DC Austin sprint
drumm’s picture

Status: Needs review » Needs work

Agreed with Bojhan.

lisarex’s picture

FileSize
1.62 MB

Think this is a great starting point. I agree, we shouldn't modify the top banner.

The hero image is really good. The map showing out global community is also good.
I'm less of a fan of the getting involved guide as it's too many links; too overwhelming at this stage of tr journey.

I'd like us to explore using font size to visually give weigh to the most important chunks of info. Right now everything is equally important :)
I've attached a rough mockup to show what I mean. (I drew it in the car so forgive wobliness :))

At this point there might be two or there chunks considered most important, but we can address that too. The ux research + google analytical should give us a good starting point on that

lisarex’s picture

Actually I didn't mean just font size for visual weigh, but grouping / layout.
Also not sure why I drew the other secondary content in little boxes. The grid width of the image is fine too. :)

As for the menu on the right side of the page, a manually curated list of pages might be good. Things like the new topic pages could go there.

Which brings up another issue: do we really need the horizontal nav (community home, getting started, etc? I'd suggest we have 1 related nav section here, and if we use the vertical space, it gives us more room to work with.

dddave’s picture

stpaultim’s picture

Assigned: BLadwin » Unassigned
Issue summary: View changes
Issue tags: +Amsterdam2014

I am looking for someone to write an issue summary for this issue and figure out what needs to happen to move this issue forward.

stpaultim’s picture

stpaultim’s picture

It would be helpful if someone could apply this patch and create a new screenshot. I believe that some elements of the design have changed since the last screenshot was uploaded. For example, I am pretty sure that the current patch does NOT make any changes to the banner (as shown in screenshot).

mgifford’s picture

If @drumm can tell me which sandbox I can apply this to, I should be able to do this in the next day or two. I'm just not sure which sandboxes are safe to muck with.

stpaultim’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

@rteijeiro was trying to get this set-up today, but ran into some tech issues. He will try again. I will try to push this issue forward over the next few weeks. I spoke with @drumm about it at DrupalCon. I would like to see us get at least part of this implemented and updated as we move forward.

One of the "remaining tasks" is to decide "Who is going to maintain this section." Is there a workable way to designate a maintainer?

rteijeiro’s picture

Status: Needs work » Needs review
FileSize
829.95 KB

I applied the patch and uploaded the images. Looks like I'm not applying the patch correctly so I uploaded them manually :(

This is how it looks like after patch applied.

I can continue working with this but I'm not sure if I should follow the design provided in #1288470-20: Create 'Community' Section.

Also I don't know why images are repeated with two different sizes.

kattekrab’s picture

I'd really like to take the Documentation search box off this page and put it on the documentation page.

Is that out of scope? Should I open a new ticket for that?

stpaultim’s picture

mgifford’s picture

@kattekrab - on #36 that's an existing issue. Not sure where, but confident it exists already and has for some time.

mgifford’s picture

lizzjoy’s picture

Status: Needs review » Postponed

I'm setting this to postponed because there is content strategy work happening and you can see the beginning of that work at https://www.drupal.org/news/content-strategy-update-february-2015 and https://www.drupal.org/node/2463205

tvn’s picture

Title: Redesign top-level landing page for "Community" » Create 'Community' Section
Category: Feature request » Plan
Issue summary: View changes
Status: Postponed » Active
Issue tags: -Usability, -Novice, -Needs issue summary update +d.o community

As we are getting ready to roll out content strategy recommendations, Community page will be transformed from a simple static page into a dynamic Section of content. Visual and layout concerns raised in this issue will be addressed as part of the process. Re-purposing this issue to be a plan for the overall Section. Will update issue summary with more details shortly.

tvn’s picture

Issue summary: View changes
hestenet’s picture

Drupal.org/community is now a proper section, which means it can have additional pages as well as it's own set of blog posts (at last, a place for the CWG!)

We haven't yet redesigned anything - it's just a straight port of the content from what was there before - but it's a start!

kattekrab’s picture

Wow! Hooray :-)

Thanks @hestenet - great news, great work!

jhodgdon’s picture

We need to revive this issue....

Over on #1414988: [Meta/Plan] Create a new Getting Involved Guide section, we are discussing creation of a companion "Contribute" guide, which will be made up largely of existing content from the Getting Involved Guide that is relevant to contributing to Drupal.

At the same time, the content that is currently under /community and in the Getting Involved Guide that is more about connecting to the community should be moved to the Community section.

In addition, there was an idea from #2332789: Reduce Novice Contribution differences and consolidate landing pages, content, blocks (currently marked as a duplicate of #1414988: [Meta/Plan] Create a new Getting Involved Guide section) that suggested: Move the "Governance" and "Code of Conduct" sections (currently hidden in "About Drupal" and "Getting Involved Guide") into a new "Community Structure" book, modeled after the Ubuntu Community Structure page: http://community.ubuntu.com/community-structure/

So... I'm going to update the issue summary here by going through the comments and making sure it's all there, and making it clear what the goal is relative to that other issue. I think we'll need to do them together.

kattekrab’s picture

Thanks @jhodgdon - that sounds like an incredibly useful thing to do!

jhodgdon’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Updating issue summary... I think I've got most of the comments in here covered.

hestenet’s picture

Please feel free to reach out to me (or post a comment here, I'm subscribed) when folks other than CWG members should be added as maintainers to the /community section - that should give them the necessary permissions to implement these changes.

jhodgdon’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

@eojthebrave had a really good suggestion on the related "Contribute section" issue that also relates to this section (about linking to this in the Welcome email we send to new users), so adding this to the summary here.

jhodgdon’s picture

Project: Drupal.org content » Drupal.org /community section
Component: Other » Content
Status: Active » Fixed

The community section has been done! Probably this belongs in the new project set up for that. Someone needs to credit Rachel Norfolk for this.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

apaderno’s picture

Component: Content » Community Content
Issue tags: -d.o community +drupal.org navigation