[Archive] Drupal Association improvements to Drupal.org

Drupal has many (thousands of) modules and themes that make it an attractive platfrom to use. But often researching modules and themes takes longer than to build them into a solution. Here are a few suggestions for how the new d.o could help people find modules and themes more quickly:

• A list of modules by category, where you get a page with all the modules in that category (not like the current category list with a pager). Please retain the current listing of all modules - a text search in the browse through this page is often the best way to find things.

With all the new sites added to the planet lately it seems like a silly process to be done manually. Also the border between Drupal Planet and Drupal Talk is getting pretty vague, especially with all the resposts of late. The Smashing Magazine post about the Drupal Toolbox appeared 4 times on the same frontpage for example.

My suggestion: replace both Drupal Planet and Drupal Talk with Drigg. For those who don't know what Drigg is, it's like Digg but completely written in Drupal. Here are a couple of popular sites running Drigg:

Cracking the open-source community code for drive-by developers

Matt hits on one of the core driving factors of this redesign. In order to grow the Drupal project, we need to make it easier to contribute. How do we do that? Big prizes await those who crack it.

Kieran

Hi All,

Today is the first in our scheduled dates to ask you for your feedback (if you haven't done already). There are two areas of work done to date that we need your help on:

1. Initial Research

Leisa has been doing some fantastic work on trying to get to know you, the wider Drupal community, and what does d.o mean to you?

Leisa has been openly blogging the process for a while now, but we're still gathering comments and suggestions. This is a pretty fluid process.

a) the experience strategy for drupal.org, (http://www.disambiguity.com/draft-drupalorg-experience-strategy/),
b) proposed audience segmentation for drupal.org (http://www.disambiguity.com/insiders-and-outsiders/) and
c) initial wireframe ideas for drupal.org (http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-come-wireframe-with-me/)

In addition to these posts, please browse around the Flickr group (http://flickr.com/groups/drupalredesign/), follow the Twitter group (http://twitter.com/drupalredesign)

1. Initial Branding

For a bit of back story as to why Drupal needs to change its logo, please read this post from Larry.

The latest round of logotypes are attached here. For more rationale on how we got to this point, please have a look at:

a) What's in a Word(mark)? (http://www.markboultondesign.com/news/detail/whats_in_a_wordmark/),
b) Initial Wordmark designs (http://www.markboultondesign.com/news/detail/initial_wordmark_designs/)
c) Why do we need a new logo anyway? (http://www.markboultondesign.com/news/detail/why_do_we_need_a_new_logo_a...), and
d) Cap D or Not? Splash or Not? (http://www.markboultondesign.com/news/detail/cap_d_or_not_splash_or_not/)

hi all

just a little update of more redesign collaboration we're doing.

if you haven't already, consider whipping up a wireframe of a page you think needs some attention ref: http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-come-wireframe-with-me/

We're also getting into tackling Information Architectuture issues with an online cardsort: http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-help-overhaul-the-information-arch...
(phew, what a long URL!)

and a discussion about whether d.o is one site or many: http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-one-site-or-many/

I've created a javascript which adds plain-text links to issues for easy copy / paste into issue comments. For information, see the handbook page. But this brings up a topic for the redesign - what functions or features are missing which would be useful to developers? I'm sure many of them belong in project.module, but obviously how they are implemented would affect the redesign :)

Lets provide users with a better experience, designing for A crappy browser like IE6 will just hold us back, and limit the features that can be done, 37 signals and Apple MobileMe have already announced dropping IE6 support on all their products, shouldn't we make this step as well ?

Lately the Drupal Planet is starting to look more and more like Drupal Talk. A whole bunch of people have been added to the Planet the last couple of month and I don't feel it has done a lot of good to the quality of the feed. I wonder what the criteria is to get added to the Planet these days, and even what we expect the Planet to be?
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hi all

Just wanted to get these in front of you for your review - we're currently discussing:

a) the experience strategy for drupal.org, (http://www.disambiguity.com/draft-drupalorg-experience-strategy/) and
b) proposed audience segmentation for drupal.org (http://www.disambiguity.com/insiders-and-outsiders/)

take a look, give us some feedback!
and don't forget you can also participate on Flickr, Twitter and Slideshare!
(more info here: http://www.disambiguity.com/opening-the-floodgates/)

thanks
Leisa