Drupal.org redesign sprint Jan 8th

Over the last year, the redesign has been progressing with many infrastructure and feature improvements. We have had 6 drupal.org sprints in both Europe and North America. On January 8th, 2010 we are going to have a drupal.org redesign virtual sprint. Many members of the Drupal community and the drupal.org infrastructure team have participated in the redesign so far. In order to help complete the minimum viable redesign we've recruited 24 Drupal consulting companies to help implement the main redesign landing pages.

Sponsoring companies

We specifically requested companies to sponsor pages because this part of the redesign required a broad range of skills including project management, content, design, theming, and development. We believed that sponsoring companies were used to marshaling a collection of resources to deliver sites to their customers. We believed these companies could scope, estimate, and deliver these redesign sections. While we've had 24 companies sponsor sections to date, we still require more sections of the site to be sponsored. If your Drupal company is interested in sponsoring a section please review the redesign implementers guide to understand how to contribute.

Additional skills needed

While the sponsoring companies are taking responsibility for completing sections of the design, they rely on a redesign team which provides a wide range of skills and knowledge to complement their efforts. Each of these redesign teams can use additional contributors:

• Infrastructure administration: We have 10 development and staging sites set-up because Drupal.org is a large and complex site which can not be easily set-up in a local environment. Administrators manage code from the drupal.org CVS, drupal.org SVN production and redesign branches, update drupal.org databases, set-up automated theme and module deployment tools, and debug sites at the systems level.
• Project management: We have 24 companies participating, an infrastructure team with dozens of members, and technical specialists consulting on specific features. Right now there are over 100 individuals actively participating in the redesign, and over 200 in total who have participated in the last year. Coordinating everyone requires a lot of project management. We currently provide project management for theming, redesign training, and task assignments, but we need project managers to take on other aspects of the redesign, including content migration and testing.
• Search Engine Optimization: We have a great team of search engine optimization experts. However, for a site as large as Drupal.org, we are going to need many volunteers to re-visit Drupal.org's theme and content to ensure we are accurately presenting Drupal.org content to search engines.
• Search and Solr development: The infrastructure team has done a great job deploying, stabilizing, and scaling Apache Solr search on Drupal.org. Our Solr developers are working to provide more Solr functions to help the sponsor companies implement sections like Search and Download and Extend, which make heavy use of Solr. We need more developers who are familiar with Solr to mentor, train, and debug these Solr queries.
• Content migration and IA implementation: The redesign restructures much of the content on Drupal.org. This is a huge task to migrate content including static pages, documentation, and forums. We have many popular pages that are visited by tens of thousands of unique visitors each month, and they have to be able to navigate or discover that content.
• Dashboard widget development: On of the key parts of the design is the dashboard, which will capture many of the feature requests and customizations the community asked for during the design process. We have a team working on stabilizing the dashboard and extending functionality, but we want to launch with a fixed set of widgets that take advantage of a minimal set of dashboard features. It's also important that the dashboard widgets be scalable and are designed with performance in mind.
• Testing: To make sure Drupal.org works with all these changes , we need to do a lot of user acceptance testing. Test plans need to be written and executed. Where possible, automated tests should be written to test functionality and evaluate performance and scalability implications for new features. If you've wanted to learn how automated testing can help with the development of your Drupal site, drupal.org is a great place to learn.

Logistics

Many of the teams that are sponsoring design landing pages are in India, the UK, and the west coast of North America, which covers a wide range of time zones. As a result, we will be meeting on IRC in the #drupal-infrastructure channel over a 24 hour period on January 8th, 2010. In order to be able to participate effectively, you'll need to read the implementers guide and request an admin account on the staging site and access to the SVN repository for the drupal.org code base. This will take a few days, so you should plan accordingly. If you would like to participate, please contact us via the Drupal Association contact form.

Improvements are an ongoing process

The easier we make it to participate in the Drupal project, the more value people will get from using Drupal. Working on Drupal.org is one of the best ways you can help our 1.7 million unique monthly visitors get more value from Drupal. This first phase of the redesign is opening Drupal.org to more contributions from the community. We are hopeful this explosion in contributors will lead to an acceleration in improvements on Drupal.org. We hope you join us!