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Front Page Schedule - aka - How to get your story on the front page

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Last modified: February 4, 2010 - 00:35

How to Get Your Story On the Front Page

If you have something that's really, really interesting to a lot of visitors to drupal.org and you did a really good job of writing a post in the forum (images, good writing, proper use of formatting to make it readable) then you can request it to be promoted to the front page. To do that, edit this page and schedule a time for your post and then create a webmaster issue for your post that contains a link back to the forum post and your rationale for having the story featured on the home page.

Unless they are highly relevant, the teaser should not contain widgets or images from external sites (i.e. no "digg this" button in the teaser). All images in the post should be added as attachments to the webmaster issue you created and the post should be written with all image tags using the image files hosted on drupal.org.

Please note that unless you are a member of the documentation team or a site maintainer, you likely will not be able to use the Full HTML input format, which is required to display images. In this case, you should attach the images to the webmaster issue, and indicate where they should appear by placing the image tags in the post. A site maintainer can then activate the Full HTML input format to ensure that the images will display before the post is promoted.

Motivation for this Page

Per the Site Maintainer's Guide front page posts should ideally be spaced apart by 24 hours. If you promote a post to the front page in less than 24 hours after another post was promoted and the previous post was scheduled here and you failed to schedule your post here, then your post may be demoted until 24 hours has passed.

Questions about the schedule

Why are there posts in the schedule that have not been promoted after the scheduled date has passed?

In many cases site maintainers are working with the authors of the case studies to improve the posts and get more community reviews. Authors are not allowed to promote their own front page posts, and site maintainers should get at least one other site maintainer to review the post. Posts should be published in the forums first, and then sent for review in Drupal IRC channels or on the documentation mailing list. Dates in the schedule are estimates, and are not guarantees. Site maintainers may not check the schedule every day, and will want to ensure the authors are available to answer questions and fix problems when the post is promoted. Posts might be rescheduled.

Why was my front page post not promoted?

The site maintainers are responsible for quality of front page posts. In some cases a front page post may not be promoted because it is not relevant for the community (e.g. Buy my new product), or the quality of the content is low ( e.g. I launched a blog). In other cases site maintainers may not promote stories where the content is considered offensive (The site promotes hatred toward a specific group of people). In other cases, verification of the content of the front page post might be challenged before being promoted (e.g. Unhappy customers, or bad business practices). In all cases, promotion of front page post is a privilege and not a right. Site maintainers individually and collectively, there are over 100 site maintainers, use their judgment to promote quality posts to the front page.

Can I promote my local Drupal event on the front page?
In 2008, we estimated there were over 800 Drupal events including local Drupal user group meetings, Drupalcamps, Drupal tracks at conferences, and Drupal training events. Since Drupal.org is really for the international community, it is more appropriate to use groups.drupal.org to promote local events. Promoting a regional event usually means that almost all the people reading the announcement are not able to attend the event. It is better to have content on the drupal.org that is appropriate for the entire community.

Examples

Use these examples as models for front-page postings:

The Schedule Itself

(Please place topics in order of post date AND include a link to the webmaster issue. Once pages have been promoted they can be removed from this schedule.)

Upcoming posts

Written stories that need Webmaster review/approval

No Webmaster issue/not yet written

  • Paul Taylor Dance Company website case study
 
 

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