Groups.Drupal.org Update: New maintainers and plans for Drupal 7

Back in 2009, Groups.Drupal.Org (GDO) went through a major transition including upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, a redesign, and adding new maintainers. We are currently in the process of a similar transition. The site has already gone through a redesign, and as we make plans to transition to Drupal 7, we will also be moving to new maintainers for the next year.

Making it easier to contribute to GDO

Between the Drupal Association’s initiative to improve *.drupal.org, the community brainstorming on site improvements, and feature requests in the Groups.Drupal.Org issue queue, there is clearly a lot of interest in making improvements to GDO. However, for folks who want to roll up their sleeves and help by filing a patch, the path to replicating GDO for development purposes hasn’t always been clear. As a strategy for making it easier for anyone in the Drupal community to file a patch and streamlining maintenance efforts for the site, we have proposed that GDO will run the Commons distribution of Drupal for Drupal 7. Of course, this means that improvements made to GDO benefit sites powered by Drupal Commons and vice-versa, that generic improvements to Commons will benefit GDO.

New maintainers: Meet Ezra, Scott, and Justin

Helping with this transition, Ezra Gildesgame (ezra-g), maintainer of Drupal Commons, is also now a maintainer of groups.drupal.org. Ezra is the technical lead for Drupal distributions at Acquia, has been contributing to Drupal for over 5 years, and also maintains the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD).

Our other new Groups.Drupal.Org maintainers are Scott Reynen (sreynen) and Justin Toupin (justin2pin) from Aten Design Group. Scott is Lead Developer at Aten and has been contributing to Drupal for over 5 years, including helping to organize the Denver group on GDO. Justin Toupin is CEO at Aten, and has been leading the organization’s involvement in Drupal since version 4.7.

Getting involved: How you can make GDO better

This process of upgrading Groups.Drupal.Org is an especially good time to get involved by joining a few different groups and queues:

• Commons related are the Commons group, and the Commons issue queue for bugs/ideas that affect all Commons sites.
• The GDO issue queue is for features and tasks specific to Groups.Drupal.Org.
• Groups to discuss the site: http://groups.drupal.org/maintenance and http://groups.drupal.org/groups-drupal-org

Note that Ezra, Scott, and Justin have agreed to work on the site for at least a year. If you think you might want to take over in a year, the best way to do that is to get involved working on the site in these issue queues.

Thanks, Greg & Josh!

This is also a great opportunity to thank Greg Knaddison (greggles) and Josh Koenig for their help maintaining Groups.Drupal.Org over the past few years. Josh and Greg found they were too busy with other projects unrelated to community site building which made it harder to find time for GDO (Josh building Pantheon and Greg working with Acquia’s Profesional Services Security Group and the Drupal Security Team). Greg and Josh hope that transitioning to people who spend more of their lives working on community sites will help GDO be an even more valuable collaboration platform for our community.