When someone downloads Drupal they need to know that it is their responsibility to stay on top of updates. At the Boulder Drupal Camp for *advanced users* this summer only 10 of 22 people in the room were aware of a security hole that had been announced a week earlier. So, I think we are not doing a good enough job of getting people hooked into a channel for those updates.

Yes, update status in Drupal6 will reduce the need for this newsletter. However, unless people use the enhanced contrib version of update status they won't get updates via immediate channels like emails/rss feed. They would have to login to their site to know that it's got a security hole which may not happen for a while.

The specific page where I think the block should be added is http://drupal.org/project/drupal I believe this will require it to be moved from the left sidebar to the right sidebar as well to prevent having both sidebars on the /project/drupal page (which would be visibly jarring to users compared to other project/ pages).

Comments

dww’s picture

dww
we/he/they
commented

I'm not opposed to making this block more visible. However, this isn't true:

Yes, update status in Drupal6 will reduce the need for this newsletter. However, unless people use the enhanced contrib version of update status they won't get updates via immediate channels like emails/rss feed.

Thankfully, we fought and won the battle to keep email notifications in the core update.module, so that much works out of the box, without contrib. Unfortunately, site admins have to know about that setting and configure it -- arguably it should default to the site email address and be opt-out, but that's another story...

However, I don't know a good way to have a single block in 2 different regions depending on what page it's on, just using the core UI. :( Any suggestions on that? It'd be a drag to fork the block, just for this...

dww’s picture

dww
we/he/they
commented

arguably it should default to the site email address and be opt-out, but that's another story...

http://drupal.org/node/199774 ;)

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented

Ah, great to hear.

I still feel like it's a good idea since that immediate notification requires configuration and Drupal6 becoming the popular distro is still months away.

My suggestion is that we move the block to the right side in general - the only other place that I know it is shown is d.o/security and d.o/security-team and in both places it seems reasonable to move it to the right.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

I am ok with either moving the block or duplicating it. It would be nice if it could be graphically enhanced somewhat.

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented

I agree that these pages could be improved - I proposed GHOP task to analyze our whole download funnel and provide alternate mockups (http://drupal.org/node/199806 - requires formalization as a task).

Let's wait for their input on designs in general.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

Webmaster Issue Queue Cleanup - 2 year old issue

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

This no longer seems like a good idea to me. I'd rather we just encourage people to use update.module which we already do pretty well.