a bundle of suggestions

I must say that drupal.org is good generally. It provides most of the information necessary to get one started with the CMS in an easily accessible fashion, but I think there are certain interface changes which might be made.

1. Make it obvious what the red Asterisk means in every context. It seems to denote "necessary field" generally, but that does not make sense in the context of http://drupal.org/project/releases. (Primarily because it says "The contributed modules are not part of any official release and might not work properly" which precludes the asterisked modules from being "default" )

2. In the case of subscriptions module it should be noted what sort of notifications are possible, (e.g. control panel style, e-mail) and whether this can be set as default. This is partialy because subscriptions are an intensely important (basic even!) part of any truly useful forum system. I personally have great trouble remembering where I posted what (unless I specifically create bookmarks, and that is not feasible beyond a certain point.) This problem is excerbated by the fact that unlike other modules, "subscriotions" does not have any online documentation.

3. Given that one of the principles of drupal is xhtml/css compliance, ( http://drupal.org/node/10250 ) it should be stated at least somewhere that drupal is not xhtml/css compliant yet. Or it actually might be. I haven't been able to find that information. My assertion is based on the fact that while drupal.org claims to be xhtml 1.0 strict, it is not. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.drupal.org This seems relatively minor; wbr simply has to be defined, but the problems seem systemic; use the validator on http://drupal.org/project/releases.

4. [very minor] Please don't make the link back to the homepage (the one on the drupal logo, displayed on every page) a javascript action. This is unnecessary. (simply use an imagemap) It's only important because I tried to open drupal org on a new page, but was unable to.

5. Under general features it's a good idea to state if the basic distribution is browser compatible. This should probably also be stated in modules.

6. under "Contributed modules" accessible at http://drupal.org/project/Contributed%20modules it's a good idea to demarcate "issues search submit "

7. The http://drupal.org/project/releases page is excellent, and there is no real need for http://drupal.org/project, or at least there should be an easy way to link to http://drupal.org/project/releases from http://drupal.org/project. Currently the only way to do that is to click "downloads" again; this is rather unintuitive, and there is a further risk that modules unsuitable for a particular version might be downloaded.

8. More on http://drupal.org/project, http://drupal.org/project/drupal should link to http://drupal.org/project/releases, "drupal.org maintainence" should link to http://drupal.org/project/issues/3202, "user experience" should link to http://drupal.org/project/issues/3213. The current links are quite pointless.

I realise there is a possibility I should have posted on http://drupal.org/project/drupal_org_maintenance, but these are not truly "issues".