At the Drupal Association retreat in San Francisco, the general assembly set the completion of the drupal.org redesign as its number one priority for 2010. The assembly agreed to fund five contracts to help eliminate obstacles that had prevented the community from completing the redesign.
Five key roles were identified: Architect, Solr developer, Project module developer, and an infrastructure developer. The association also elected to upgrade Drupal.org code repository from CVS to Git to help maintain Drupal.org as the hub of Drupal development.
Hiring process:
Job descriptions were developed in conjunction with both the redesign volunteers and the Drupal.org project managers, Kieran Lal, Chris Strahl, and Lisa Rex. The job descriptions were then posted to groups.drupal.org for 3 weeks. Approximately 35 applications were received and a dozen interviews were conducted by the project management team. The contracts were negotiated with Drupal Association Interim General Manager Jacob Redding, to whom the project team reports directly. Contractors work day-to-day with the project management team. The association will pay for the contract work using the funds raised through memberships, advertising, partnerships, affiliates, and DrupalCon sponsorships.
The association project team:
Architect:
Neil Drumm: Neil Drumm is maintainer of the current drupal.org theme, blue beach. Neil also maintains and leads api.drupal.org and is a member of the drupal.org infrastructure team. Neil is also the Drupal 5 maintainer.
Responsibilities:
- Develop architecture road map including a list of approved modules
- Create implementation plans for each of the prototype pages
- Review all issues for the Blue Cheese theme, drupalorg module, and the drupal.org development infrastructure
- Ensure that integration of Project module, Solr search features, and Git migration will work together.
Solr developer:
Bill O’Connor, Achieve Internet: Achieve Internet sponsored the development of Solr search and project browsing components of the redesign. Bill has been active in this development since December 2009. Bill brings experience in advanced Solr development and Drupal scalability to this project.
Responsibilities:
- Develop custom search facets for the search results filters, and the download and extend pages
- Develop and deploy multi-site search across all *.drupal.org sites
- Extend search indexes to include project statistics and project meta-data
Project Module developer:
Derek Wright, Chad Phillips, Mike Prasuhn, 3281d: Derek and Chad have been developing the Project module for over five years and are the lead maintainers for the project module system on drupal.org. Derek and Chad have extensive expertise in revision control, automated software building and testing, and release management. Mike Prasuhn is also an active contributor to the Project module.
Responsibilities:
- Add project meta data to allow for advanced project browsing, ApacheSolr integration
- Project module migration from CVS to Git
Git migration lead:
Sam Boyer: Sam is the co-maintainer for the Panels module and maintains the Version Control API. Sam is an expert in version control systems and Drupal stack scalability. Sam wrote the original community road map to upgrade from CVS to Git.
Responsibilities:
- Develop a migration path for 8600 projects from CVS to Git
- Integrate the drupal.org project revision control interface with Git repositories
- Build out a QA, and testing process for the migration
Infrastructure developer:
Narayan Newton, Rudy Grigar, Tag1 consulting: Narayan and Rudy are former system administrators for Oregon State University Open Source Labs, where they managed much of the drupal.org infrastructure. Narayan is the lead system administrator for drupal.org.
Responsibilities:
- Enable community contributors to get access to the drupal.org theme, code base, and sanitized copies of drupal.org databases
- Creation of automated set-up, provisioning, and maintenance scripts with hudson to allow redesign infrastructure administrators to automate
- development, staging, and production tasks while preserving security
- Standardizing the drupal.org server infrastructure
What does this mean for the Drupal community?
The Association’s decision to offer paid contracts to contribute to the volunteer-led redesign was not taken lightly. After over a year's evaluation of 6 redesign sprints and 9 months of volunteer community development, the Association took the recommendations of the redesign project managers. The introduction of paid contractors introduces risks to this volunteer effort, but ultimately it was decided that removing the obstacles to the redesign completion was a higher priority. The association also felt these contracts are an effective use of the Association’s financial resources to support the Drupal project.
The Drupal community is still responsible for completing the redesign. We are looking forward to making it easier to contribute to improving drupal.org.
Getting started and sprinting
The redesign team has begun work as they have become available over the last four weeks. Today and tomorrow the redesign team is meeting in Portland, Oregon to co-ordinate their road maps, milestones, and time lines. If you are local to Portland or attending OSCON, you can meet the sprinters at the Drupal meet-up tomorrow night.
The redesign team sprint attendees include the paid contract team as well as the Association Interim General Manager Jacob Redding, project manager Chris Strahl, Dries Buytaert, and redesign lead Kieran Lal.
How to get involved
The best way to get involved in the redesign is to join the redesign implementers group. The project management team is prepared to help train you on how to contribute with the new BZR code, and redesign infrastructure. We are looking for themers, developers, content contributors, and testers. Contact us via the association contact form using the volunteer to help with drupal.org redesign category.
Comments
use Drupal & PHP for search
IMHO, Drupal.org and drupal CMS should exclusively use Drupal & PHP for search, with whatever improvements are needed.
It is very odd to use something else, for example, like using Wordpress3 for blogs for the blog part of Drupal or VBB for the bulletin part of Drupal. Then, Drupal can be just used as User registration and User Bases Administration, with Security layers and Taxonomy-CCK-Views while Blog, Forum, Comments (eg, IntenseDebate) are rolled out to stuffs who do it better.
Such Java based SOLR dependance does not speak well about the integrated-brandibility of Drupal also. Particularly when Search is a very much and a very important integral part of Drupal just as "nodes" are.
It's not a Drupal demo site :)
I agree that there is a room to improve the built in search of Drupal. But drupal.org is not a demo site of the core drupal install. It's a "demo" of a high traffic custom community site built on Drupal. ;o) It has some custom modules and it can have a custom search solution which demonstrates a way of building large Drupal sites.
Agree with thamas
On a site as massive as drupal.org a normal search solution has its boundaries. At a certain level you simply have to use other solutions to ensure quality search results and performance. I think this is common to other CMSs, too.
You can see the solr-integration as a very good example of how well Drupal integrates with other components and that Drupal has a working solution for massive content bases like here on drupal.org.
We depend on many things
We rely on an operating system. We did not write our own webserver in PHP despite it's possible. We use a third party version control system despite it's totally possible to write one in PHP. We use tar despite there is Archive_Tar.
The right tool for the job. We do not use SQL for searching but Solr. Would you be more content with sphinxsearch because it's C?
--
Drupal development: making the world better, one patch at a time. | A bedroom without a teddy is like a face without a smile.
Drupal search is quite good
@ddave - it means Drupal has boundaries or is a limited solution to massive sites? Not a good solution neither a good campaign. Do you recommend integrating VBB or WordPress for multiblogging or XYZ to show that Drupal has good integration power?
@chx
there is NO operating system module in core or contributed drupal
there is NO webserver module in core or contributed drupal
there is NO ...
there is "node" module in drupal and we use that
there is "blog" module in drupal and we use that
there is "aggregator" module in drupal and we use that
there is "search" module in drupal and we use .... ? ? ?
Wordpress uses its own search, e107 does also, Geeklog too.
If you would use the drupal
If you would use the drupal default search you would loose many features, the server would cry, basically noone would be happy.
It's a fact and not changeable that php based search systems cannot scale as much as c/java based search systems.
Additional you should use one tool for one task, like in the unix philioshy. There is a reason why microsoft word is not so fine for many people, it does to much different tasks.
If you take the debate to
If you take the debate to scalability and php
- does php scale as much as perl or python or ruby on rails ?
- so do we discard Drupal and use Plone for cms purposes then ?
- one tool for one task eh? so vbb for forum, wp for blogs ?
As I said Wordpress is a massive site too, and uses its own search :) Neither the server nor the persons cry there!
@kaakuu I agree that the
@kaakuu
I agree that the drupal's search is a good core module and if you extend it with some custom modules it even gets better. That said: After hitting a certain size using a search solution like solr is the by far better solution. dereine brings the arguments to my declaration.
There are revisions and yet
There are node revisions and yet we do not use that for revision control of our source code. (We do not actually use the blog module either but that's not a part of this discussion.)
There is a mail facility in core. Yet Drupal.org uses mailing list software for sending out tens of thousands of mails.
There is a search module in core. It's great. It works for many sites. It does not work at the size drupal.org is. Patches are welcome. It's there because a lot of Drupal installs power small sites on shared hosting where you won't find anything better than PHP+SQL. Just because it's there it does not mean it needs to work for a site the size of Drupal.org
As for Wordpress.com using default WP search, don't be ridiculous. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/search-wordpresscom/ The search is powered by a new open source project called Hounder from a company we worked with called Flaptor.
Note that craigslist is using sphinxsearch and wikipedia is using lucene (and solr is just a wrapper for lucene). Noone is using PHP+SQL to search a big site. It's not the right tool for the job.
Whether Ruby or Python scales better than PHP is a totally off topic debate here. If you'd know what you are talking of you'd know that a) PHP as a shared nothing architecture inherently has limitless scaling b) the problem with searching is not the application layer but the underlying backend and the widely available MySQL installs are simply poor in this.
--
Drupal development: making the world better, one patch at a time. | A bedroom without a teddy is like a face without a smile.
I was speaking about "node"
I was speaking about "node" module, not node revisions.
We do use "node" module of Drupal.
We do use "forum" module of Drupal despite it lacking seriously end user features like VBB. We have not shifted or got enhanced by VBB or VBB module. What is your take on that? Forum is the largest used stuff on drupal and yet one cannot bookmark posts and suffer from undeletable things in the tracker.
If you are using external mailing list, seriously, do not.
Regarding debate on PHP I never wanted to debate, it was a simple re-reply to someone else's post above.
If you are speaking about wordpress.com let us take SOLR to the cool drupal.com and drupal gardens.
I speak of wordpress.ORG when I compare drupal.ORG. And org or org equivalents of similar cms-es e107, geeklog and others. They all use their inbuilt PHP search, seriously.
If Drupal search cannot manage drupal.org it means that the search needs overhauling. Has even 10% effort or investment been done to do that like the ""usability-expert-recommended" non-productive forced-upon useless overlay thingy?
I am done with this, feel free to do whatever you all like.
Solr Search is a module you
Solr Search is a module you can download for your own site if it gets that big. You know this already I suppose but also I feel like there are reasons for sticking out with forum and blog modules (even if d.o doesn't use the latter). I think you have more potential with things like comments and nodes to play nicely with the forums compared to using something like phpbb.
(also the overlay is awesome imo! I couldn't handle the old admin panel)
Doesn't it make more sense to
Doesn't it make more sense to have at least 1 good and stable and bug-free version instead of simply plowing along with new version after new version? It looks like they're trying to get to Nr.10 just for fun or something. It was Drupal 4 just the other day wasn't it? My Drupal 6 site has barely been finished and now I'm already worried about v.7 and I see many people are already talking about v.8. OMG I don't have words to express how crazy that sounds and how insecure it makes me feel about the future of my site. I can only hope it all works out in the future.
Maybe you should be using Movable Type....
1) Drupal has thousands of test cases to ensure it is stable and as bug-free as possible. BTW, there is *no* such thing as "bug free". Ever, no matter the platform. Otherwise we wouldn't have "Patch Tuesdays" from Microsoft, bug bounties in Firefox, or maintenance in Wow. :P
2) Proprietary software is stagnant with long release cycles. Think IE. That's the beauty of open source. It is constantly being refined and evolved. If you want to wait on a small pool of developers to come out with new software, get a proprietary solution.
3) Drupal.org has gone to great lengths to ensure that there are stable migration paths between versions. So upgrading should be relatively painless. Web Developers know that you should realistically look at reskinning / doing major updates on your site every 2 years. Drupal isn't doing anything "crazy" or out of the scope of usual development cycles. I would be more concerned that you seem to think your site is "done" and you basically want it to be a museum where nothing changes. a) boring b) unrealistic
4) It is common practice to begin planning the next release as soon as the most recent one is out. Other corporations do the same thing, you just don't see it because they don't have the glorious transparency of open source. Wordpress does this too....read their blog. As soon as v3.0 was out, they were planning features / enhancements.
Seriously?
Major Drupal releases are coming out much slower than they were back in the 4.x days. Although 4.7.0 was an exception to the trend (it was a big release) - people were getting very impatient about that one at the time.
History:
4.4.0 Apr 2004 (5 months after 4.3.0)
4.5.0 Oct 2004 (6 months)
4.6.0 Apr 2005 (6 months)
4.7.0 May 2006 (13 months)
5.0 Jan 2007 (8 months)
6.0 Feb 2008 (13 months)
7.0 ?? 2010 (30+ months)
Note the 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 releases are the equivalent of the 5, 6, 7 releases in terms of significance - after 4.7 the numbering scheme was changed from major.minor.patch to just major.patch as in reality there was no distinction between major and minor releases and it confused a lot of people. Explained here.
As mentioned here you still need to plan for periodic upgrades - even if they aren't as frequent as they used to be.
Depending on how long Drupal 8 takes, Drupal 6 could end up being could end up being supported for nearly 4 years. 4.x releases all got less than 2 years of support and it was only 4.6 and 4.7 that got more than 1 year. If you don't like upgrading you've never had it this good.
The reason developers are talking about Drupal 8 is because when Drupal 7 (which has been feature frozen for a while now) is released soon, that's when the development of new features can start up again and they need to start planning what to do.
It's not like any of this is secret information.
When a software ( a php
When a software ( a php script ) just comes out it is expected that it will need a few cycles to mature or to offer "standard" features, that is, the features that end-user visitor-members in a site generally expects. But as things advances people expect that APIs will stabilize and there will be easy feature additions. What is normal speed to devs may be actually fast or impossible for us irrespective of bar diagrams and stats about dev history.
Most of us are too busy or have too many headaches to generate users and contents for our site so that tackling CMS upgrades become difficult or not so easy, we need peace of mind and not constant worrying about how can I upgrade my modules or whether I can upgrade those at all, we need not always get shadowed by the thoughts that by the time we have not yet made to Drupal 7 there are talks of D8 which will mean yet another shifting looming on the horizon. There are only 24 hours in a day and most sites have single webmaster-cum-admin. Particularly consider the following:
- it is not same as upgrading my filezilla or firefox, where one click and the thing is over
- in browsers or ftp client we do not have to bother about user generated data
- my old win 95 Paint still works in windows XP but 4x drupal modules do not in 5x
- upgrades paths are there but it is still difficult for the average us and easier to stick with old ones
- majority of us has come to drupal because one or two module or some module which was not in wordpress or geeklog or e107, - this module means a lot or means the uniqueness of our site and when this module is missing in newer version of Drupal, we simply cannot use the newer Drupal
- what is the incentive for the end-users that is registered members for our site? Consider these members like members in facebook, orkut, any abc site. What do they get NEW if I as admin change to a newer Drupal?
The problem is they do not get anything NEW or better, so why do I upgrade
- there may have been lot of geeky amazing enhancements behind the scene
- but these changes are not as drastic as when happened from 4x to 5x
- but these changes do not offer something drastic new to the site member joe
- the size of install base has increased hugely and so has CPU/memory needs, this can mean a change in my host or hosting plan which I cannot afford (note all are not multideveloper multidollar sites that you see in drupal showcase)
- there has been no significant increase in speed or reduction in memory consumption in newer drupal
- for the end users (who are not admins, editors, mods etc) there is ABSOLUTELY nothing new to offer, infact if some modules never make it it will mean difficulty in maintaining whatever features we were offering at present and hunting for new modules and difficult or impossible tranfer paths
- see how Wordpress allows to manage (not just add like in D7) image and comes with default WYSIWYG editors, AUTO-DRAFT etc for the end users so that they are happy to add and manage content OUT-OF-THE-BOX. Activity streams and social stuffs have become integrated as part of CORE in stuffs like even Vanilla forum, as well as PRIVACY controls are getting into core or standard core modules in other softwares, which means a lot to end users. With new Drupal I cannot do this - I need modules and by the time these modules will be perfect there will be alpha Drupal 8 knocking at door.
The list can go long but to the mind willing to accept I hope the issues are clear. So far as new webmasters who are bedazzled pleasantly to great levels of comfort by the new Overlay, let us see what is the adoption rate - only future can tell. But Drupal not imbibing "social net" has already lot of users going to WP-Buddypress/Elgg and Drupal not imbibing end-user EASY blogging cannot stop the trickle to WP. Many 5x sites have still found no need or incentive to upgrade to 6x. 6x seems to be have bettered for the common non-geek admin and endusers but 7x has not, instead a fuller and trendier 6x would have been more welcome.
Running a site, particularly single-man-show sites which do have a fair number of visitors and daily contents, has its woes and problems - there are daily queries to answer, keep in touch with users, check the forums or blogs and comments. None of the devs or may be a very few has ACTUAL busy sites so that it is easy for them to play with "upgrades" and stay on bleeding edge. For the average of us we want that we do not have to bother about the CMS itself (was not that the entire purpose of a CMS, we ponder) and we can add easily CURRENT features (probably in the form of modules) when needed. Hardly this psychology and this practical aspect is understood in such discussions.
I don't understand where your
I don't understand where your complaints are getting at?
It is interesting that many people don't like to upgrade but recently I've tried to upgrade the office from win xp to windows 7 and its insane the number of complaints I've had. They also really hated it when I upgraded them from IE6 to IE7 because tabs were new and annoying and they couldn't open loads of windows easily.
From the time of the Industrial revolution people smashed up looms. It just seems like whenever there are changes there are people like me, the neophiles who abitrarily love change for the sake of change and people who hate it just because it is different.
imo Devs should ignore both of us. But are you suggesting Drupal developers should just stop working on core? You talk about a fuller trendier drupal 6 but with the huge number of modules why would they need to make a fuller trendier drupal 6? It can already be fuller or trendier with more modules?
Upgrading is a real hassle
Upgrading is a real hassle for me!!! My site is local country specific and every time there is an upgrade I have to wait till 2am in the morning before there are not many people online to be disturbed. People also seem to reject change, they want the buttons and content layout to look the same for goodness sake or you'll get "friendly suggestion" mails for Africa. I'll take a boring, yet active and profitable site before a pimped up version any day. Upgrading modules would be my first priority but I'm sure these guys know what they're doing.
Noooooo...users don't get anything...<snark>
Users DO get something. They get registered on a site that is keeping up with the times and has increased security measures. Because let me tell ya....if I'm registered on a site and it's using a version of PHPBB (which is arguably WAY harder to upgrade than Drupal....and way less secure ) and my personal info get hacked, I'm going to be mightily p!ssed.
It only takes one slip up for a company to lose its entire reputation. I guarantee you will lose registered members if your site gets hacked.
If you upgrade to a new version of Drupal and your layout changes for non-editors, then you don't understand how to theme. That is not Drupal's fault.
Actually, your site administration should get *easier*....not harder...with an upgrade to D7. Features that required multiple modules (think Views, CCK, and ImageCache) are being moved into the core. That is a LOT less for you to maintain separately.
Drupal's not that bad, I
Drupal's not that bad, I think I like it. Must admit that in the past 4 or so years I've known about Drupal; Nothing seems to have changed and it still feels very unfriendly, blue, etc. I only wish that Drupal becomes as active and friendly environment as Wordpress has. I must say; I do agree on many points you make. still uses Drupal 6 anyway...
So get involved
Patches welcome. Really. I'd love for core search to be more powerful than it is. If you can figure out a way to do so while still relying on a lowest-common-denominator SQL backend then you're a better search engine engineer than most Drupal developers. We'd absolutely accept improvements to core search so that it scales to million-node sites.
Right now, though it doesn't. Solr doesn't even blink when doing so, and it reduces the workload on the main web server in the process. That makes it a better tool for the job.
How badly would it reflect on Drupal to have the Drupal.org site melt every time someone ran a search? I think we can all agree that would be substantially worse than "oh yeah, and we cleanly integrate with an enterprise-grade search server built by some of the smartest search engineers in the world outside of Google; it's even easy to setup, so give it a try!"
Drupal is a first-class CMS and web platform. It's not a first-class search engine, nor does it claim to be. It does claim to play nicely with first-class search engines, and that claim is demonstrably true.
--
Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/
Thinking Functionally in PHP: https://leanpub.com/thinking-functionally-in-php
Okay.
Thanks. Indeed a lot came to light, and this post/s will help many who believe that PHP-MySQL based solution Drupal can be their solution to CMS needs with needs for a site search.
If in power rather than patches I would have set up "contract work using the funds raised through memberships, advertising, partnerships, affiliates, and DrupalCon sponsorships" for such a problem to figure out a 'good' search, as a decent CMS needs to have its own decent search too particularly when people are looking for the same(CMS+search) and not hunting a "first-class search engine".
"Drupal is a first-class CMS and web platform. It's not a first-class search engine, nor does it claim to be" : This is an important and helpful clarification and will help many like me, I believe. Thanks.
Edited to add : Incidentally SOLR fails miserably at unicode search eg. Indic words. Thus ruled out for unicode folks.
I give kudos to D.O. for
I give kudos to D.O. for running Solr search. I go to wordpress.org and run a search and it's powered by Yahoo search. I go to Joomla and do a search and it's powered by Google Search. That's not the "out of the box" search functionality of either system.
As Larry points out, there is a limitation to what you can do with search in MySQL + PHP. Yeah the core search module could use some serious attention and improvements, but I don't see anyway to get it to the point that it would be acceptable to run on D.O. with the size of the dataset here. Anymore the best search functionality out of MySQL comes from using full-text indexes and even that has it's performance limits. I recently switched one client's site from a custom MySQL/fulltext module over to Sphinxsearch just for that very reason.
The best way to move forward would be to open an issue for the search module against D8 and start getting the wheels spinning on how to improve core search. Now that Drupal will require MySQL 5.0.15+, perhaps a full-text solution would be best, since fulltext has become a lot more better performance wise since the 4.X days, and has even more performance improvements in 5.1+. If that was the desired route, it would require a special table to store the search text, since Drupal tables will default to InnoDB in D7 and you can't do fulltext against InnoDB.
---------------------
HollyIT - Grab the Netbeans Drupal Development Tool at GitHub.
Search Working Group
http://groups.drupal.org/search-group ;-)
Drupal Search or 3rd party?
Crell totally agree with you.
When we are talking about open source development we need to bring to our attention on major issue:
"What is the best tool for the job?", ultimately this means:
1. Develop and maintain in order to get ahead the requirements and resources available
2. Migrate to better ways if this is needed
3. Keep using AND not exclude earlier developments just because for some of the times do not scale nicely as the underlying infrastructure scales, unless they are totally obsolete
4. Keep trying to make it better without sacrificing current staging or future plans of it
Open Source oughts to be as flexible as it needs to be and if for some large scale installs another approach is needed than the already used one then this is good, just because that means expansion is necessary!!!!
I love to see integration of systems/software/approaches/etc etc if this will advance to a higher UX.
Open source development should not fight over expansion if this is what is needed!!!!
This is what keeps us alive!!!!
You are mistaken about core Drupal search
You are mistaken: core Drupal doesn't do search. It passes queries on to the database and processes the results for display. The Apache Solr module for Drupal does the same thing, treating Solr as an additional (special-purpose) database.
Drupal doesn't care whether the database is written in C or Java, but users care about the quality of search results.
Serious, large-scale, high-traffic Drupal projects always take advantage of multiple technologies, not just MySQL.
If you are put off by the complexity of installing yet another technology, perhaps you should consider Pantheon Mercury, which integrates a high-performance stack. It replaces Drupal's anonymous page cache with Varnish, replaces the block and other object cache tables with Memcache, and replaces search with Solr. It's available as a hosted service and can be deployed in the Amazon cloud.
Or use a hosted version of Solr
Acquia offers a hosted version of Apache Solr, which we built for the very reason of making it easy to get started without the complexity of installing Solr and running it yourself. http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-search
---
Work: BioRAFT
Exactly what I said. And
Exactly what I said.
And instead of fixing the cause they still insist to fight the effects. That's sad.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/15223#comment-150643
Drupal is great, it can handle really big sites but such projects end in many core adjustments, making an upgrade very time intensive.
So you are forced to use modules like SOLR search and this leads into the vicious circle.
I'll pass on the whole offsubject discussion
I realy hope it gets done in 2010... can't wait until it goes live!
...
A couple weeks ago I had a dream that I logged into d.org and the new design was live! (I took a few days away from this site after that!)
~silverwing
Getting drupal.org
Getting drupal.org "functional" (in par with the average comptetition) is long overdue, so very happy to hear that resources are used for this purpose! Looking much forward! :)
Yes, Yes, Yes !!!!
I can't believe how many valued contributors got hooked and ended up feeding the trolls :-)
Guys, don't shadow the huge news in this post with petulant bike-shedding!
1) Drupal.org redesign is going to see the light on or about the release of D7
2) Drupal is switching to git!
Thanks, time to ask the companies I work for to make a donation to the Association.
Come to the San Francisco
Come to the San Francisco Drupal User Group to find out about the D.O redesign proces and while you are at it - you can learn about GIT. RSVP here http://bit.ly/13mLnH
filtering
whatever happened to being able to filter by version, most popular? where did these filters go?
Looking forward to the new redesign...
Looking forward to the new redesign as I've been waiting for it for a while now. To be honest though, I enjoy how Drupal.org currently works.
What I do enjoy seeing is a project like Drupal, which could have limitless financial support, if it required it, actually paying developers to get the job done. I hope this will get around the bureaucracy / motivation which has held up the design to this point.
As for the search issue, I agree that search should be improved, but I'm in favour of having crappy search out of the box, and having a well integrated and easy to develop on SOLR search for larger sites. Ubercart's catalog are greatly improved by using SOLR, so I've been moving this direction myself even for small sites. I'd rather put my support between easier SOLR search, with perhaps a PHP only SOLR type backend like "Faceted Search" module, which can be installed as pure PHP. More integration between these two projects would be wonderful (i know it's going on).
I'm looking forward to GIT upgrade as well. I upgraded my own company to start using GIT because of the Drupal upgrade and I'm looking forward to submitting actual code, instead of just .diff in issue queues.
I do find it funny though, that the redesign effort is using BZR :)
It's about time drupal.org
It's about time drupal.org got an overhaul. Drupal status as the best cms is not currently reflected by the quality of this site. Go to joomla.org or wordpress.org and while they dont strike me as anything more than decently designed sites they are in a different league to drupal which comes across as a bit too basic in this day and age.
It is about time that drupal.org started using the Advanced Forum module for it's forums. A quality forum is of huge importance to a community site. Yet drupal.org has been hampered by the extremely basic default forum module. Again, look at the forums on joomla.org, they blow drupal's forums out of the water. And unfortunately this sways many newcomers in the direction of joomla. Using advaned forum module drupal can easily match the forums on joomla and come close to vbulletin. And they are already being used on ubercarts site which is very active. If you guys are serious about overhauling this place DO NOT NEGLECT THE FORUMS as that is where users spend most of their time.
disagree
I like the forums for their content here. They do the job well with out distractions. Maybe allowing to have email notifications though, but with all the threads I'm added in, it would get anoying.
So visit "My Account -> Track" and see where the new comments are.
Although, this should definitely be more clear for new users. Drupal imho always gets thumbs down (n) for end user experience.