Drupal.org redesign plan for the Drupal Association

[Update: these thoughts were organized into the file attachment. Many sources went into this document. Please review for accuracy and thanks/apologies to those whose posts in this group have been used/mangled.]

Here are my thoughts for how to formalize the request for proposal (RFP process).

Rough outline of what the RFP should contain:
1. About the RFP (states summary of scope and top priorities for project)
2. About Drupal and the Drupal Association
3. Background on Current Site
- Personae served

I conducted two brief interviews to understand what the goals of local event organizers were.

[13:19] yoroy> ok, inital goals:
[13:20] yoroy> - get a first idea of how many and what kind of people/shops are using/working with drupal
[13:20] yoroy> make them aware of each other's existence
[13:21] yoroy> since it was the first one
[13:21] yoroy> we tried to be as 'open' as possible, something for everyone
[13:22] amazon> and business goals?
[13:22] yoroy> though 'Translation' was the central topic for the hands-on part of the day
[13:22] amazon> ok, great

Reposting: http://association.drupal.org/blog/kieran/how-to-successful-social-strat...

Two weeks ago I attended a joint Web 2.0 (conference) and Web2Open (unconference) two part session on building a social strategy for your business. Web 2.0 and social software luminaries Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented a session " how to have a successful social strategy" based on their extensive research and book "Groundswell".

Pragmatist

Today two concepts were raised on IRC: Slashdot style reviews -- but also, Amazon.com also have a "was this review helpful to you" feature. Also we could have "karma" (userpoints) that you can earn by handbook pages, comments here and there, patches, commits... you can spend it on badges and reviews. Very quickly it'd become quite visible who has Level 32 in Module Maintainership :D

Please indicate how to make small tasks to contribute to the Drupal project.

If you want to help with the hands on implementation of the Drupal.org redesign you can help right now by testing Views 2 Beta 1 for Drupal 6.

http://www.angrydonuts.com/views-and-help

Disclaimer: It's just brainstorming. I'm not strongly supporting these ideas for now.

1) services.drupal.org
A place for Drupal commercial services. It would be:
- Yellow pages for Drupal shops and freelancers
- An extension of Paid Services forum section

2) themes.drupal.org
What about resurrecting Drupal Theme Garden? Users normally like it and its helpful to show that Drupal is not that ugly.

José San Martin
Chuva Inc. | Southern Drupal

Thought it'd be a good idea to start a discussion specificially on how this might work.

This is a very rough outline from my first post on this subject Drupal.org the redesign - high level.

I've been discussing with wundo a few ideas we have about a "Drupal knowledge base" and I think this could be included in the coming Drupal.org redesign.

This Drupal knowledge base would be a place for keeping very consistent and comprehensive documentation for users and developers and a place to gather useful information that is currently dispersed on the web.

This knowledge base, as planned, would include these elements:

OK, this is a proposal for drupal.org's overall structure, drafted out of an irc discussion which lasted at least 2-3 hours.

In total, drupal.org + 4, 5, 6 subdomains

drupal.org

Hello, I've begun contacting individuals who've expressed interest in taking on a formal role in the Drupal.org redesign.

Here are some roles I am looking to have filled. The roles will take approximately a 12 month commitment, depending on the role.

• Business owners - Business leaders from the community with proven track records of deliver solid business results of a major Drupal site deliverable
• small consulting business representative: A person to represent the interests of small <= 3 person Drupal consulting shops

During the Drupal Dojo Birds-of-a-Feather meeting at DrupalCon Boston we discussed two seperate items that I believe are interconnected: figuring out how to get more video lessons into the Dojo and doing a better job of attracting more potential teachers and students to the site. To address the first of these issues, I committed myself to doing outreach to individuals and companies who are creating video-based instructional materials to try and get them to submit their work to the Dojo. After that session I started to look around the series of tubes known as the "internet" and I found quite a few videos. But, what I also noticed was that a good percentage of those videos already are being shared with the Drupal community, but through drupal.org/videocasts rather than the Dojo, which oddly doesn't seem to appear on the videocast pages at all. This brought to mind something that I've heard Josh and others talk about, the idea that we should consider moving the dojo to something more aligned with Drupal.org itself, and I have to say that the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me.

So, my question is this: does it make sense to consolidate our collective efforts in one location that is better connected with d.o. itself? Something like video.drupal.org, or possibly as a subsection of a tutorials section of the site (which is where the videocasts now sit), which could be called something like tutorials.drupal.org.

What brings me to this topic is all the excited talk I've been hearing second hand about splitting groups.drupal.org and drupal.org into many separate chunks (documentation.drupal.org, news.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, downloads.drupal.org, content.contributed.maintained.6.modules.downloads.drupal.org , you see where this is going). What worries me is that in such an implementation it may become too complex to get to key areas or discussions.

The way I see it, there are a couple major roadblocks for making such a system work (here comes the dreaded Robin-list, grab some coffee):

Continue reading and comment at my blog >

I know I am weighing in on a sensitive topic. I found that out earlier today with my poorly received attempt at a humorous blog post entitled "Decapitate Drupal, please". I was unprepared for the negative response I received (though I did get some positive response as well). Someone rightly pointed out that Drupal Planet was not the right place for the discussion and suggested I come here. So, here I am.

So this is my first post in the Drupal Community – I will warn you that this is LONG and may seem to be off-topic but I promise I will pull it all together (I hope)…

I was inspired to “bite the bullet” after attending one day @Boston DrupalCon. I think that my hesitation to post on Drupal or participate in any Drupal groups is an indication of the need to work on redesigning the home of Drupal.

I only found out about this group yesterday. I've been involved for a couple of months in a discussion to relaunch the Drupal Newsletter as a stand-alone site, ideally on a sub-domain such as newsletter.drupal.org. I just spoke with Dries this morning, who liked the idea, but suggested news.drupal.org. He also suggested contacting members of this group, since you folks have already been working on the bigger picture.

You might want to take a look at my post about a proof-of-concept at https://groups.drupal.org/node/9432 and also http://drupal-newsletter.org (the proof-of-concept itself).

How to SEO Drupal.org:

1. Better keyword selection. Phrases like "Community Plumbing" are cute/fun/interesting but do little to actually move our cause forward. We should change the title tag to: "Drupal Content Management System, an Open Source CMS"
2. There isn't an H1 tag. There should be an H1 tag (styled to match the theme) just beneath/near the logo that matches the Title Tag.

NOTE: this is a work in progress. We're trying to gather up a summary of this group's postings in preparation of the d.o redesign talk. Pardon the dust.

Agenda for panel workshop at DrupalCon Boston about the d.o redesign efforts:
http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/drupalorg-redesign-panel

Panel presenters

Angela Byron
Tiffany Farriss
Kieran Lal
Daniel Zhou
Nedjo Rogers
Derek Wright

Revised agenda

Here is a revised agenda based on Tuesday evening's discussions with the modification that Kieran will be there. We'll leave the previous draft below because it contains useful details.

1. Aims and leadup – Nedjo Rogers, Drupal Association
2. Scoping – Tiffany Farriss, Palantir
3. Progress so far – Angela Byron, DA
4. Identified pieces
   • Aiding module evaluation with pivots, Daniel
   • Improving developer toolsets, Derek Wright
5. Fundraising – Kieran Lal, DA
6. Getting involved

Andy Oram recently posted a very interesting article on the O'Reilly Radar on how to improve online documentation. It's a very insightful analysis of the problems that face those writing documentation.

He suggests two tools should be implemented on any online documentation effort:

1. Quizzes
2. Cross-reference management

He recommends each documentation page include a simple quiz at the end. This is to help monitor quality. If readers aren't answering a question right, this probably means that section of the documentation needs improved.

For the past two months, I have been acting as one of the administrators of the Drupal side of the Google Highly Open Participation program (GHOP for short). Briefly, this is a contest that is sponsored by Google in which secondary students (ages 13-18) can claim and complete short one week tasks created by the Drupal community for cash prizes. One of the requirements of the program is that everyone has to use the Google Code task/issue tracker for tracking the "official" progress of the students throughout their tasks. As I have been pretty involved with development of our own issue tracker (the Project issue tracking module used on drupal.org), I thought it would be useful to provide a comparison of the features of these two different systems and make some suggestions of how we can improve the Project issue tracking module to make it even better than it already is.

I'll start by giving an introduction to the main issue tracking features of both the Project issue tracking module and the Google code tracker. I'll also give a description of the administrative user interface from an individual project owner/maintainer's perspective. Next, I'll provide a feature comparison and point out the pros and cons of both systems. Finally, I'll provide some recommendations on specific areas where we can add or improve the Project issue tracking module to make it better than it already is. I want to point out that I am not mentioning any of the features of either tracker that allow it to interface with code, releases, or repositories since we did not use any such features for the GHOP program and thus I would not be able to make a fair comparison.

Hi drupallers!

UPDATE: The submissions ends on 14th january now!

What I want here is to take some community ideas for a good proposal in one of these tracks: "Development: PHP" or "Cases/Solutions" at the 9th FISL (International Free Software Forum). One of my ideas is to promote Drupal for the general brazilian developer community as a good solution for content management issues.

The FISL is one of the world's biggest open source meeting and is the biggest in Latin America.

Greetings,

the #1 best idea from this post: http://groups.drupal.org/node/6943 is the monthly newsletter. Learn more why.

There is already a newsletter page, but we could do it way better: http://drupal.org/newsletter (Note I don't talk about mailing lists, there are very good mailing lists here: http://drupal.org/mailing-lists. I am talking about building an opt-in EMAIL LIST. This means that only Drupal can send emails to all the list members, but no other member can send an email to others. Also only Drupal sees all the members, and the members are unable to see each other.)

Hello fellow Drupalers,

Bence (http://groups.drupal.org/user/13320) has a point. Ironically I was on IRC tonight storming up this idea with amazon and webchick. Personally, the whole thought stemmed from wanting a Drupal coffee mug as a gift, much like http://buytaert.net/drupalcino. After asking around on IRC I was informed Boris has a site on cafepress (http://www.cafepress.com/drupal). That storefront should be on Drupal.org to generate more sales etc leading to a bit more funding for Drupal Association.

Greetings!

I only found this as Drupal shop: http://drupal.org/node/15101
But this node says: "Drupal does not have any official merchandise"

Why would we launch a better Drupal shop? Because it will generate more income, and it will be a great marketing resource for Drupal.

Look at these shops of other open source communities:
Joomla - http://shop.joomla.org/
Ubuntu - https://shop.canonical.com/
Mozilla - http://store.mozilla.org/
Creative Commons - http://support.creativecommons.org/store
Wikipedia - http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia

IRC meeting to review work for the "Request for Proposals" for the redesign of Drupal.org

Hello, the rfp wasn't quite ready for the board to vote on at the board meeting on Monday. Fortunately, we are scheduling a new meeting and will be submitting an improved RFP at that meeting. I'd like to review what can be done to improve this RFP. Depending on when the board meeting is going to be, we might try another working IRC meeting after this.

These two documents need the most work
http://groups.drupal.org/node/7070
http://groups.drupal.org/node/7071

Cheers,
Kieran

Hello, we are going to make available three sites for teams to redesign.

1) Redesign of Drupal documentation. Documention on Drupal.org is one of the main areas for improvement according to the "State of Drupal 2007" survey. Fortunately, there's been a lot of work in Drupal 6 on the handbook module. We are going to make available a copy of Drupal.org that will be upgraded to Drupal 6 so we can start exploring how to make the handbook easier to work with. Please talk to Steven Peck if you are interested in redesiging this handbooks with Drupal 6.

According to a survey of over 1,000 Drupal users, the most requested feature for Drupal.org is a recommendation system for the modules section. With the exponential proliferation of Drupal modules it's certainly easy to imagine why.

Because the discussion about this subject has been splintered into so many places, it was suggested (see here and here) to create a thread within the D.O. Redesign group in order to centralize the brainstorming, mockups, proposals, etc for this initiative.

http://mydrupalblog.lhmdesign.com/5-things-drupal-could-learn-wordpress-...

Note: 4 members of the re-design team are editing in another document but will continue to update here. Please notify Kieran if you'd like to edit this document and I'll work to make sure we an incorporate your changes.

Development Guidelines:
Different requirements for different sub-sites.

drupal.org

From the wishlist Dries gathered

* A Possibility to display/entering ratings for modules shall be provided.
  Ratings must be visible on the download page of the module and on module overview pages

Purpose
The Drupal community currently has a web presence that is somewhat outdated in appearance, structure and in the presentation of content. An opportunity exists to re-engineer the site to better reflect the goals of the Drupal community and incorporate the more useful features. Upon completion of the development of the site, the Drupal community will assume full responsibility for web site content maintenance and administration. All content, coding and graphics will become the sole property of the Drupal community.

Description

Drupal.org has 720 000 unique visitors per month. The Drupal.org front page is viewed 1 Million times per month with 16% of pages as exits.

Drupal does not have a show case to show off our best examples from the front page. Videos of showcase sites could help to demonstrate the power of Drupal. Many Drupal service providers complain that their clients are not impressed when they come to Drupal.org.

Drupal.org does not have a workflow that leads to empowering users to take advantage of the community.
* We do not encourage users to sign-up for a Drupal.org account

Hello, I have received a template for a re-design plan. I would like to discuss the outline of that plan and get some help taking on specific sections of the re-design plan for submission to the Drupal association next week.

We will meet using IRC in #drupal-redesign

The past two-three weeks I've spent a lot of time in the Drupal 6 issue queue. This involved a mixture of reviewing patches I really wanted to see get into Drupal 6, writing or re-rolling some small patches for small bugs and typos, and trying to clear the issue queue as much as I could down to a manageable size. I commented on something like 160 issues in seven days, and read through many more.

I asked more than 1,000 existing Drupal users (not Drupal prospects) what they would like to see improved on drupal.org. A prioritized wish list is provided below:

More ideas and suggestions might be available in the comments of http://buytaert.net/drupal-org-wishlist.

**Please update this outline to be a full multi-page in-depth redesign plan for Drupal.org **

I am trying research the costs invovled in a complete redesign of Drupal.org. All Drupal related implementation would be done by volunteers from the Drupal community but we need to get estimates on what it would cost to get the following deliverables:

Deliverables would include:
1) Audience research analysis, basically a report to the community. Functions mapped to tasks and features.
- http://buytaert.net/drupal-org-wishlist

2) Concept for the site - Drupal infrastructure applications

With the addition of the new Getting Started guide, we really ought to redesign the http://drupal.org/handbooks landing page to draw attention to it, as well as re-organize things so it's a little less intimidating. Let's brainstorm ways this can happen! What things can we do to improve this page?

Here is a thread about module statistics usage: http://drupal.org/node/165380

Paul Resnick and his graduate students from the University of Michigan have been working on something called pivot blocks and double pivot blocks.

http://drupal.org/project/pivots for the module
http://pivots.cms.si.umich.edu/ for a demo.

Steven Peck, head of the Drupal documentation team has suggested a redesign. I am going to suggest that we attempt to implement this redesign using the new book module in Drupal 6 in Barcelona. Let me know if you are interested in doing this either during the session or remotely.

• Getting Started *
• Project and features
• Before you start
• Drupal 6
  +- Installation etc
• Drupal 5
• • Installation etc
• Drupal 4.7
• • This will contain many of the older pages that aren't getting unpublished.
    -Concepts
• • Collected articles etc.

• HowTos and Snippets*

• HowTos

Hi, I have been given access to AWSTATs? There is a lot of raw data. What questions do we want to answer that will help in the re-design of Drupal.org?

With 250% growth and an extremely obvious need for change on Drupal.org, we need to assemble a plan for moving forward.
Opening up the analytics will only help professionals consult better on the design of the site moving forward. Google analytics is an excellent free platform that can be shared amongst many users.

A special email list could be started as well to funnel the reports to. Users could then subscribe to this as well.

Any design without doing this is pointless and is going to be stabbing at the dark.

Accounts: Create a google.com/analytics account.

We are doing some slow query analysis. Turns out the database is reporting over 100 hours of slow queries due to just two features.

New forum topic block, and next/ previous forum topic links.

I don't believe these include anonymous users.

3637 - 1-day unique users
9380 - 7 -day unique users 9380
21916 - 30 day unique users
154677 -All unique users

Joomla survey says who uses joomla

Some comments about the survey design

Understanding the users
1) Identify sector, what is your job, what computing knowledge do you have

These are all good questions that provide an understanding of the users.

Frequency
2) How long have you used Joomla

-Here they miss the opportunity to discover usage patterns, which are important considerations in user centered design. Designing for all day usage versus quick update usage.

Introduction

(To be inserted)

Section 1.

Q1. How would you describe yourself as a Drupal.org user?

• Learning developer
• Professional Drupal web developer
• Core contributor
• Personal module, theme, or profile maintainer
• Documentation team member
• Help others with support issues
• Other: [free response]

Q2. How often do you visit Drupal.org?

• Multiple times a day
• Once a day
• A few times a week
• Once a week
• Once a month or less

Q3. When you visit Drupal.org, how long do you spend on the site?

First draft, please help to re-write answers to questions for consistency, style etc.

Click Here to take survey

I formed this group to get people working on understanding the problems with Drupal.org. The idea was to do qualitative and quantitative analysis. I wanted to have some thoughtful data and a plan that could be funded for the re-design of Drupal.org.

Several of the subscriptions lately have not indicated what kinds of analysis they are willing to contribute. I don't want to see this group become a Drupal.org feature orgy.

If we decide to go with the concept of 'landing pages' for each target audience, here's an idea of what the developer.drupal.org portal might look like. You'll notice that it's missing stuff like "latest project releases", but that's because those are going to go in something like download.drupal.org. ;)

Attached is potential information architecture redesign based along functional/user persona lines. This needs work, however it's one method of organizing content.

Whether or not these are actual different sites or not remains to be seen... there are pros (could install specific tools for each site -- ex diff module on the docs site, project module on the dev site) and cons (link rot o-plenty, lack of cohesive search) to both.