By Gábor Hojtsy on

Thanks to the work of numerous people through free time contributions, our upgrade sprint in Cambridge, MA, and several testing and bugfixing hours committed by the community, today we were finally ready to make the jump and upgrade drupal.org to Drupal 6. Our site runs several interesting modules, many of which receive little love outside our infrastructure, plus we are running on multiple database servers and webservers with several other helper components in the backend. So while we crafted a fine plan for the upgrade, it took a few more hours then originally planned.

On the upgraded site, you should be able to enjoy some new features such as ApacheSolr based faceted search; the project browsing pages redesigned based on facets for easier filtering and search; as well as new, simplified forums based newsletter publication (using mailman as the email sending backend).

Two known issues which cropped up during testing:

  • Some user customizable block settings are lost. Once logged in, you might want to revisit your user settings page, and set your preferences. Due to how Drupal updated its menu blocks, most of the customized blocks settings are gone, and should be reset individually.
  • Drupal 5 allowed login with case-insensitive credentials, but Drupal 6 requires case-sensitive sign-on. Make sure you enter your name and password exactly as you've registered.

If you find any other problems, check the list of known issues related to the drupal.org upgrade and see if it has already been reported. If not, you should report a new issue, and please tag it as "drupal.org upgrade" (expand the "Tags" fieldset when creating the issue and enter the tag name).

While the upgrade is live, the implementation of the redesign of the website is still underway. Just last week, we had a successful redesign sprint in Paris (retrospective forthcoming), which helped us cover an amazing amount of work on the theme, some of the great functionality such as the dashboard and even more ways to browse projects. We are not done with the redesign yet, the existing items need more polish and we are still missing big pieces. Therefore your support to our work is essential. Watch the drupal.org frontpage for news on how you can work with the redesign teams and/or contribute financially. Your donation is highly appreciated!