Drupal.org redesign implementers

The Drupal redesign needs several infrastructure managers to help manage testing sites for redesign themers and redesign developers. A Virtual Machine will be provided to the infrastructure managers. You will be given access to recent copies of scrubbed database copies of Drupal.org.

Duties will include:
1) Approving SVN Accounts for themers and developers to the private theme and drupal.org code repositories.
2) Creating new drupal.org instances for themers to work on.
3) Pushing theme and code changes from SVN

To learn more, see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/23645

Damien is working on setting up three instances we can use for this project: redesign.drupal.org, staging-1.drupal.org and staging-2.drupal.org. If you want access to these instances, upload your SSH key on this thread.

Here are details that we'll need to discuss:

• What are our development needs?
• What do we do about managing the database?
• How will we handle configuration changes?
• How can we make the database available for developers using local environments?

Hello everyone,

We are putting the redesign sites back online!

Here is the scheme we are putting in place:

http://redesign.drupal.org

will be the main redesign site. Its code will be automatically checked-out the subversion repository at each commit.

Two independent staging websites will also be available:

http://staging-1.drupal.org
http://staging-2.drupal.org

So it sounds as though getting together for IRC or Skype meetings more often will be beneficial. What is your schedule like? When are your best days, and when are your worst days? What time period are you most available and less available?

What is your availability for the next month? Roughly how many hours a week are you available? What do you think your availability is for the rest of the summer?

And while we're at it, mention your speciality: designer, themer, developer, etc.

If you have any interest at all in this project, then respond! Knowing a rough head count will greatly help in planning!

We need to discuss how we want the d.o redesign project to move forward. One- to 5-day sprints every few months is not a sustainable solution. Maintaining momentum and continuity is nearly impossible.

Initial thoughts:

• Take a cue from the Aegir project and introduce a proper schedule
  • Require weekly time commitments and weekly meetings
  • Initial thoughts: 4 hours per week for at least three out of every four weeks (meaning you can skip one week from every four to catch up on client work)

Logistics

When: Friday, June 12, 2009
Where: 20 Ames St., Lower Level Media Lab. Conference Room 135 (look for double glass doors "001"; go through doors, up metal staircase; 135 is at the top on right.)

I've been helping with documentation pages and found that some pages appear to be editable, but in fact are off limits.

This seems to be related to Full HTML pages or Auto-generated pages. The pages themselves look like any other page - which is what causes the confusion.

Would the redesign infrastructure team please discuss possible solutions to this that involve a visual queue?

After my hand gets slapped for dinking with a page, I then go beg forgiveness OR
After I try to edit a page I realize I have to go grovel in another issue queue to get someone else to do my dirty work.

Could we add a task to clean up existing contribution branches by removing invalid ones
(e.g. DRUPAL-6--1-0 or DRUPAL-4-7--2-0 , and many more).

This assumes we actually have an automated way to generate a list of valid branches - not currently easily done in cvs.

This node is what sparked the issue http://drupal.org/node/97084

thanks,
bekasu

On Friday June 12th, we will be having the Drupal.org redesign sprint. All Drupal designers and developers who would like to learn how to how to contribute to theming drupal.org and implementing the redesign are welcome to attend, but must sign-up in advance.

20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA white-tiled building - Sprint is in Conference Room 135: Go to lower level of Media Lab, look for double glass doors "001"; go through doors, up metal staircase; 135 is at the top on right.

I'm not sure whom to ask nor where to look for the answer to this question.

I've been working on the doc team and trying to help as best I can.

One thing that I'm concerned about are the terms Projects and Modules which seem to be used interchangeably.

Example: http://drupal.org/project has a link on it to Modules http://drupal.org/project/modules

Yet when you click on the http://drupal.org/project/modules link, you get a page titled 'modules' and the first line says you can get a list of
PROJECTS in alphabetical order.

The Drupal project now tests every core patch for Drupal 7. To date we have tested almost 7000 unique patches, 40000 times. We are getting ready to roll out the 3rd version of the patch and core testing system, http://testing.drupal.org. In order to ensure the testing system is running correctly we are looking for a volunteer who can tune each of the volunteered servers(4-20). You don't have to be an expert in Drupal performance, you just have to be willing to learn and have some basic competency in Linux System Administration.

After reading dman's Open Letter I started to think about how module management on d.o can be improved. Not just to identify duplicated modules, but also regarding dependencies and incompatibilities.

With the absolutely fantastic growth in the number of contributed modules for Drupal it is quickly becoming more difficult to navigate through them, both to find a module that suites the needs and information about if it may create problems with modules already installed. Often this require quite a bit of research through various issue queues, forum threads and so on.

New contributed modules

Gossip

A planned module that lets the *.drupal.org sites trust each other with strong cryptography. Will be used by bakery, dashboard, and XS activity.

Bakery

Freshly bakes cookies, for session tracking and single sign on across sites.

Dashboard

Lays out and renders a multipage user dashboard. Widget server on multiple sites serve up widgets to the dashboard.

Cross site activity

I've been working on mapping out the current drupal.org website and the new design so that we can compare the pages and features between them. This will help implementers review and make sure all the bases are covered.

Mapping of the current drupal.org site is pretty much done and the new redesign partially completed. Once this is done I plan to put them side by side and match them up and then compare the Project & Issue module related components as well as review the widget list and make sure it's complete.

Drupal Design Camp Boston is a free, two-day Drupal conference on June 13-14, 2009, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is being organized by members of the Boston Drupal group as part of the growing Design 4 Drupal initiative that launched when designers and themers took DrupalCon DC by storm this past March.

This camp also coincides with the drupal.org redesign sprint at the MIT Media Lab on Friday, June 12. The sprint picks up where the San Francisco redesign sprint left off and participants at the Boston sprint will be learning how to contribute to theming drupal.org as well as implement the redesign.

Notes from today's all-hands discussion at the SF redesign sprint. We've tried to identify the critical path to launch(ability) to focus our work.

Please feel free to update this list, or post comments if you have feedback or questions.

Critical Path To Launch

• Single Sign On
• Dashboard (jquery issue) with critical gadgets (list)
• Download landing page (issue link?)

Here are some UI ideas for the screens for adding content widgets to a Dashboard. The UI guidelines omit this step. There is a 'Widgets' tab on the original MB design, which suggests the 'separate page' concept.

I have these original files in OmniGraffle format, exportable if anyone wants them.

I am not suggesting anything other than the architecture for exposing gadgets. Colors and sizes should not be taken literally.

NetVibes and Yahoo use the Top Slider method. Google uses Separate Page.

Drupal News
Recent front-page posts
Drupal Assoc. feed
Drupal Planet latest feeds
Specific Drupal Planet feed

Updates (activity streams)
Posts in specific forums
Posts by person X
Commits by person X

Friends/Follows
One-way: follow
Two-way: friends
Follows is who follows you.

Project
Single project, like the top of the contributor links
My Projects
Commits to project X

Patch spotlight
Random bugs (bug bingo)

Issues
Search results
- Specific Issue Queue (with status flags)
- Critical issues list
- Patches to review list
- Pending bugs list

This wiki page collects TODOs, must-read documentation and plans for the April 8-12 redesign spring in San Francisco. Please feel free to edit it if you have anything that should be added.

Overview

The redesign implementation has a few major task groups. Each of these major buckets of work should have someone heading it up, and incoming helpers should figure out where they're going to focus and familiarize themselves with the issues ahead of the actual sprint start date.

3+ groups for the redesign is confusing and people have a hard time locating information. Infrastructure issues should be handled in the Drupal.org issue queue anyway.

1. Make sure all posts in this group are cross-posted.
2. Remove this group.
3. Rename Drupal.org redesign theme implementers to Drupal.org redesign implementors.

Any objections?

We sat down with Mark Boulton and talked through the mockups with the designer team and the implementation team. The theme follow up was integrated into the document in the themers group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/18940 This post is about the page layout changes / suggestions made up while discussing questions which came up in implementation.

As we've discussed in Cologne, I've done a comparison of suiting modules for implementing the "Latest Updates", "Friends Updates", and "Recent Followers" blocks of the dashboard.

View comparison.

There is also an prototype for following friends with the flag module - as mentioned in the comparison. Rename the file ending to tar.gz.
I hope the comparison helps choosing the right modules.

Even though English in not a problem for me, I understand the importance and need to offer a website in other languages, so I really like that the new design have that in mind. Particularly as it also means that the internationalisation support for Drupal is moving up a few notches in priority.

Before I go into the main topic of this post, a little note about the placement of the language select. In the mockup (iteration 11), the select language listbox is placed at the bottom. I think it should actually be placed in the header instead as that will make it much easier to find. Especially those, who's English is not very good tend to leave if they don't find a language quickly without having to scroll to the bottom of a very long page. They could also be shown as flags.

Oki, back to topic. I have one site I am using the Internationalization modules in and it works just fine. The only real issue though is that browsing modules and other add-on stuff and finding information on what languages they are available in is not very easy. In most cases I have to actually download the module and check if it supports translations and if so if it is available in the language(s) I need.

So it got me thinking a bit about how this can be improved on drupal.org and I came up with the following. I will use modules as example, but I believe similar features can be applied on other areas as well, such as themes.

UPDATE: Drupal.org theming meetup/spring will be held Saturday, March 7, at the Washington DC convention center in rooms 141 and 142.

Themers unite! Let's get together at DrupalCon DC and discuss the state of the Drupal.org redesign effort. When we decide a good time and place, I'll post an event. Maybe we can add it to the BoF board?

Here's a Doodle I set up to help us pick a good time.

All changes will need to be placed in an update script. Please add any changes to this list.

Currently I think there are some issues in the page.tpl.php implementation. I'm going to use the header area to define this in particular.

Directly within #header-top-inner you'll find a grid-4 followed by two grid-8s. I am assuming that this is the intention:

http://skitch.com/eclipsegc/brdwa/skitched-20090209-163228

and not this:

http://skitch.com/eclipsegc/brdie/skitched-20090209-163528

If diagram 1 is the intention then it would be better implemented as this, which will consistently hold a 2 column layout.

http://skitch.com/eclipsegc/brdwj/skitched-20090209-162941

I just noticed that one of the questions the theme sprinters have for Mark Boulton is to do with the h1 debate. Should the logo be in an h1 as per the final iteration of the design or should some other method be used?

The SEO side of the argument often sides with reserving the h1 for only the page title and ideally, there being only one h1 tag on any page.

In a month from now most of us we be gathering in Wash. D.C. for DrupalCon. This is a great opportunity to pool our talents, keep the ball rolling, and really tackle this d.o redesign. Thinking ahead and picking up where Paris left off, there has been some talk of organizing a redesign sprint in D.C. Let's start working out some of the organizational aspects of the D.C. sprint now.

Here are some ideas I have.

• We can have meetups several evenings, after the day sessions, where we sit down together and focus on the redesign.

Hey Drupallers
So this is my pro/con list of the blueprint framework that mark bolton used for the prototyping of the new drupal.org

First up: Im a big fan of finding a unified way of doing the frontend work, but im not in it for any course - a frame work isnt good task B just because somebody else uses it for tast C.
Mark Boulton uses blueprint for their prototyping, which makes a lot of sence. Theres a lot predefined classes that makes it really easy to quickly build up a bunch of pages in html.

The Paris sprint will happen at http://www.rentals.chsparis.com/mnt/mnt.htm. Joeri is the local project manager, Gabor is the technical lead, and Dries is the lead organizer.

A group of us broke away from the overall redesign sprint @ DrupalCamp Cologne, to specifically discuss theming. We worked on outlining a few action items, and setting some deadlines. Here is what we came up with.

The Drupal.org style guide is made available publicly at: http://infrastructure.drupal.org/drupal.org-style-guide/ This has lots of information on text writing, layout, exact content of header, footer; what you must and should adhere to, etc. I'd suggest reading it in and out and know its contents by heart.

For the as of yet unnamed new theme for drupal.org, we are proposing graded browser support.

Here is a proposal as to what that could mean and how we propose to support the different browers.

The idea and the concepts are based on Yahoo YUI's graded browser support, which you can read more about here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/

What is grading?

Grading means that we will define what levels of degraded functionality and experience we are willing to accept for different versions of web browsers across different versions of mainstream operating systems.

We need to find 1-2 themers to attend the Redesign sprint in Paris. It's an added bonus if they are in Europe, to save on transportation costs. I've already check with Emma Jane and TopNotchThemes, neither of them are available.

Any other suggestions?

http://d6-api.drupal.org/ is like http://api.drupal.org/, but is running on Drupal 6. Please take a look and comment or file issues for anything you find.

I have been trying to make this a basic Drupal 6 upgrade, but more was done:

• Some parser bugs were fixed.
• Basic unit testing was added, with a set of sample code for testing.
• All pages now use themeable templates.
• Minor redesigns have happened throughout.
• Function pages show how a function has changed between branches.

Here's a quick update on the Drupal.org redesign infrastructure. The first drupal.org site to be upgraded to Drupal 6 will be the Drupal association site. We are doing this for a couple of reasons. First, we want to a small project to test out our new collaboration infrastructure: VMs, Database, SVN, Access Control to allow more people to work on the upgrade. Second, upgrading association.drupal.org will allow us to upgrade to CiviCRM 2.1 and help with fund raising. The association will be dropping case tracker module so that we can upgrade to Drupal 6.

Hi,

This week sees the release of iteration 11.

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration11

This week we have made lots of some smaller changes throughout the whole prototype, items that were delayed from iteration 10. For this release, we've paid particular attention to several pages:

1. Marketplace

2. Download and Extend

3. Modules landing page

4. Themes landing page

5. Search_by theme

6. Home page

7. Dashboard

There has been a lot of great feedback on the iteration 10 post, thank you all for your valuable input.

This wiki page should reflect an up-to-date state of where drupal.org stands in its upgrade to Drupal 6. Initial data here is based on findings in http://groups.drupal.org/node/16246 and should be updated from time to time to reflect current reality.

## SIGN UP TO HELP

Each section has "working on it:" sections, where you can mark yourself as someone who contributes to that section.

Hi,

This week sees the release of iteration 10 in the Drupal redesign prototype.

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration10

We're currently working with the Drupal Association to further define an advertising strategy for the redesigned d.o. Therefore, we've included a few more ads, but it probably isn't indicative of the final strategy.

Hi,

Iteration 8 is now available for you to browse and comment on. Last week the redesign took a pretty drastic change in direction so this week's release isn't as massive as we have worked to consolidate changes to the IA, reacting to feedback from the testing and to trends we have established in the community feedback.

Last week Leisa posted her thoughts on why we have moved in this direction and you can read her thoughts here:

http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-redesign-iteration-7-for-your-revi...

Leisa will also be posting again shortly to further discuss our thoughts and reasons for recent changes as well as talking specifically about the modules section.

The link to the latest iteration is below:

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration8

So, we've had the 'About' section in the prototype for a while now, and we're turning our attention to the content. We're seeing this section as a place for evaluators of Drupal to make a decision. But also, as this is software, there are things like technical requirements that need to be included.

So we need your opinion and feedback.

What do you think needs to go in this section?
Are we on the right lines with the current prototype?
What do you think the navigation items should be?

Hi,

Following on from last week's call for feedback on iteration 5 of the prototype ... we have now progressed to iteration 6, whereby we have begun to integrate the visual design into the prototype, making the prototype feel more like a website now and less like wireframes.

We encourage you to browse through the prototype and feedback your thoughts and ideas in this thread. The link to the latest iteration is below (please note the slight change in URL - this is because of a new version of Blueprint, and additions to CSS etc.):

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/visual/iteration6

While the drupal.org redesign is about so much more then drupal.org itself, we certainly need to clean up and improve on our act on the main drupal.org site before moving on to elsewhere IMHO. So I took a look at the modules enabled on the drupal.org website (via good old "system table where status = 1" queries), which I've attached as http://groups.drupal.org/files/DrupalOrgModules_0.pdf. Some notes:

• Drupal module was ported as site_network to Drupal 6, so drupal.org can keep offering that for backwards compatibility after and until the OpenID server is set up (waiting for that sounds like a never ending story)
• There are some interesting items on drupal.org, like dblog module enabled but without a file; also urlfilter contrib module enabled, while it is a built in drupal 5 feature.
• There are certainly items which we are not going to carry forward. The bluebeach theme is among these things, but feature module seems like a safe bet as well. It is a horrible way to present Drupal features, and should go away as soon as possible.
• Two of the drupal.org custom modules are not hosted under drupalorg module and are therefore not open source. This makes it harder to port them forward and get the community going on reviewing and helping with them. These are the ircnick module used to search by irc nickname and the update_status 1.x XML-RPC compatibility module.
• Quite a few of the modules have 6.x releases but not yet stable. In cases like image module, where even Acquia Drupal ships with them, it is a good question, whether we should believe they are stable or not. Independent verification always helps. Also, our criteria is more strict, we need to keep some existing features going forward, unless of course we can do something better.
• There are obviously 5.x modules not done for 6.x yet, but the list goes way over just the project module family. So there is lots of ground for work beyond upgrading project module.
• As far as project modules go, my last information is that dww/hunmonk/aclight look for new stable releases of the module suite for 5.x hopefully sooner then later (http://groups.drupal.org/node/10865 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/16069 for details), and then Drupal 6 patch committing will start.

I think there is plenty of work opportunity here to distribute. So let's get started!

As much as possible, file issues on Drupal.org and use other Drupal.org resources to encourage remote participation.

IRC

#drupal-infrastructure

Sitemap

New vs. Old sitemap comparison

Assets

http://www.wuala.com/drupal-redesign

SVN

Bluecheese
Drupal.org redesign (includes assets): https://svn.drupal.org/drupal/themes/bluecheese/trunk/

Bluebeach
drupal.org: https://svn.drupal.org/drupal/themes/bluebeach/branches/5

Hi All,

The redesign has made great progress over recent weeks and we would really like to share this with you!

Below is a link to the latest iteration of the redesign prototype. Please take the time to look through the pages and feedback your thoughts and ideas in this thread.

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration5

We also welcome comments on the initial design and visuals, and as with previous weeks, all posts here will be read and fed back into the redesign process

Last night we enabled Pivots recommendations on Drupal.org. We've been working on Pivots for almost 18 months and I think it represents an exciting new type of Drupal.org service. Today pivots uses a custom indexer written in Java. That indexer reads the content on Drupal.org and then indexes it to the masterdb-other.drupal.org a database server outside our main Drupal.org database servers.

See: http://mrzhou.cms.si.umich.edu/diagram-pivots-recommendation-system-do

In an effort to be proactive on the Hosting Forums being shut down issue a small group of us are attempting to define some guidelines for moderating them should they be brought back online.

Please chime in if you have feedback to add to this topic. Bullets are quotes separated by contributor, followed by a consolidated 'Official Guidelines'.

We now have the first iteration of the Information Architecture for the redesign. Let's get a list of potential base themes for the new Drupal.org.

Custom, a Drupal 7 core base theme, something else?

We will follow this up with a poll to gage interest.

Kieran