News and announcements

This past week, a group of serious Drupal developers assembled in Cambridge, MA to work on upgrading Drupal.org and infrastructure. This team includes Damien Tournoud, Derek Wright, Neil Drumm, David Strauss, Chad Phillips, Jeremy Andrews, Narayan Newton, Austin Smith, Moshe Weitzman, Dries Buytaert, Susan MacPhee and Gábor Hojtsy, and others helping through virtual channels. The team included performance experts, project module maintainers, an infrastructure manager and others. It was a great fit for our goals.

We worked hard, putting in 12-14 hour days, fleshing out solutions over breakfast, lunch and dinner, leaving a short time to sleep. We took on a big job: updating Drupal.org to Drupal 6, accomplishing as much as possible while in the same room. We managed to run test upgrades multiple times a day, integrating everyone’s work, testing interactions of new items as they became ready.

Now available:
Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right, by Victor Kane.

One week before Drupalcon DC, we will be conducting a usability sprint on Drupal 7. The first half of the sprint will involve a round of formal usability testing at the University of Baltimore (UB) led by Becca Scolan, who produced the previous Drupal usability report from UB. She will be joined by members of the Drupal community: Drupal documentation team lead, Addison (add1sun) Berry; Key members of Drupal's usability team, Brad (beeradb) Bowman, Nathaniel (catch) Catchpole and Bojhan (Bojhan) Somers.

Previous usability testing at the University of Minnesota (UMN) and the University of Baltimore (UB) highlighted a number of issues with Drupal's usability and resulted in several solutions - some of which have made it into core, some of which are actively being worked on. This will be the first time Drupal 7 has been usability tested, and the first formal testing held while Drupal is in 'code thaw'. This means we have a unique opportunity to field-test these Drupal 7 improvements when we still have some time to make adjustments before release. Learn more in the "how you can help" section below.