Site builders are not developers -- they are architects and masterminds behind Drupal-based websites. This group of individuals wants to find the best or newest modules and themes fast. They also want access to great documentation with easy to understand instructions for the tasks they need to do. And they want to get quick and reliable answers to their support questions.
Objectives (Why are we doing this?)
A barrier to Drupal adoption is the daunting process of sifting through over 13,000 modules and thousands of pages of documentation. The on-ramp to Drupal is seen as too steep. We want to minimize this so site-builders can find the right modules, themes, documentation, and support to build awesome and amazing websites.
Program
In 2012 we will work to define a Drupal.org development team, which will focus on working with the community to free up blockers and prioritize, develop, and implement modifications to Drupal.org to improve the user experience for site builders. This will include a team to coordinate and assist with community contributions to Drupal.org, comprised of paid staff augmented by a grant program and budget to hire community contributors. By correctly assigning priorities this team will also work to achieve our somewhat related 2012 objective of Improving collaboration tools on Drupal.org to make it rock for developers.
| What? | How? | Metrics of success |
Streamline Drupal.org development process
|
Appoint paid Drupal.org web development team |
|
Ideas and Suggestions
| What? | How? | Metrics of success |
| Better showcase on Drupal.org | Fund through target grants and/or make it responsibility of the Drupal.org web team - since this is not 1 time effort but continuous work to keep it up-to-date | Usage statistics, feedback |
| Implement quality/popularity metrics for Drupal.org projects | Fund Prairie Initiative | Surveys, Feedback |
| Build efficient support infrastructure - support.drupal.org | Fund through target grants, Fund Prairie initiative |
|
| Restructure Drupal documentation: - Build new "curated documentation" area or site with a targeted site builder guide covering core and contrib - Build a searchable directory of off-site documentation from "planet" blogs. - Make it clearer that the existing documentation is community-maintained. - Improve the ability to find/navigate the community documentation. - Improve tools for writing, editing, and identifying what needs to be edited in all areas of documentation. |
-Fund through target grants - Support the Documentation Team's efforts to improve/build documentation infrastructure (remove road blocks, prioritize deployment) - Host targeted, structured, small-team documentation-writing sprints for the Curated documentation |
|
| More/better distributions/installation profiles on Drupal.org | Fund through target grants |
|
The Drupal Association has not focused on this specific objective in the past so we do not have a history to build from. Several of the suggestions include coordinating UX efforts and build a web-dev team.
Idea #1: Rock out the Documentation Team
Make the documentation rock by prioritizing requests from the Documentation team. They are doing awesome work and if we can remove some of their barriers to participation and make the tools easier to use overall site experience will improve.
Idea #2: Improve the Landing Pages
Lisa Rex started an awesome initiative to layout drupal.org more methodically
http://drupal.org/node/1289748
Idea #9 Neil Drumm shared with Improve collaboration tools on drupal.org and make it rock for devs
Neil's time is highly consumed with DrupalCon and other Association business. We can hire a junior developer to work on DrupalCon and association.d.o and put up to 80-95% of Neil's time directly on community initiatives.
Neil would then be able to concentrate on:
- Freeing up the bottleneck of reviewing & deploying community contributions
- Help guide other contributions, concentrating on those that help site builders.
- Improve infrastructure to make these processes more straightforward
We can measure success by
- What is deployed and who in the community helped planning and development
- Dries's community survey
Comments
I've updated wiki page to add
I've updated wiki page to add possible programs. I did not include Improve landing pages because it seems too small to be separate program, perhaps it can just be done by possible-future-d.o-web-dev-team. Please edit if anything is wrong!
Thank you
Highly appreciated. Feel free to edit away, next week staff will be working on these documents as we come up with a full 2012. By editing you have become a part of our planning process. Thank you!
-Jacob Redding
I've been working with the
I've been working with the Docs Team and the Skill Sets team to provide a way for Off-site documentation to be aggregated in an easily searchable and navigable way.
Last month, I did a screencast of the work in progress which demonstrates the basic technology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMATfHp4AHs
A few things have changed since then (Web Taxonomy configuration is now automatic and I use a Feeds-based module instead of Views to aggregate the posts), but the basic way it works is the same.
I plan to test this with a few bloggers on a prototype site over the next few weeks. Once the basic workflow is tested with the small group of people, we could figure out where the links go in the Drupal.org information architecture, what navigation and search tools should be deployed, and what other interactions (like voting) might add value. It could also be deployed as a separate site if that's what people think is best.
There's now an article that
There's now an article that describes how this approach to decentralized documentation works on IBM developerWorks.
Updated the Wiki
I just did a fairly comprehensive edit of the wiki... check the revisions log... Hopefully I didn't do anything wrong that can't be undone -- mostly I wanted it to be clear that this page is about the priorities of site builders, not other Drupal stakeholders, and I also expanded the Documentation ideas a bit.
I really hope this all happens. The Documentation Team is ready to roll out some better infrastructure, if only we felt like when we proposed infrastructure improvements, they would be acted upon. In past years, this has definitely not been our perception (or I think the reality). Let's make 2012 the year that this changes!
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
Awesome
Thank you for the edits, they are awesome. I'm glad we're coming to a consensus on moving forward. I also agree that it's time for us to remove some of these bottlenecks and start moving our website forward! Let's do it!
-Jacob Redding
There's a duplicate group:
There's a duplicate group: http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-association-improvements-drupal-org
Should these sort of posts be crossposted to the group above? The above group has many more members; and you'd potentially get more feedback....
==================================
http://about.me/lisarex
I agree
Lot's of great ideas there. Solutions Directory, Mentoring, Restructuring of Support/About/Site showcases, and alot more. It would be great if all the ideas from here, there, everywhere could be pulled together. I guess if anyone agrees that means I volunteer:), I have alot on my plate right now, but would do my best.
An important related initiative
The Open Curriculum initiative of the Curriculum and Training group is doing work directly related to this initiative on behalf of Site Builders. Please see both http://groups.drupal.org/curriculum-and-training/open-curriculum and http://groups.drupal.org/node/172434.
FYI, I am a relative newcomer to Drupal -- I built a complex site of my own in late 2010 and early 2011 -- and am working to position myself as an expert Site Builder. I also have an MSCS degree plus extensive Java Enterprise experience engineering a flexible and reusable back-end framework for a commercially-successful vendor of a large SaaS financial services product.
Despite my background, I find D.O has a severe lack of genuine resources focused on needs like mine. This makes both my learning and my project work exceedingly expensive in terms of the time it takes to get up to speed with and to actually work with Drupal's superb library of modules -- core, contributed, and commercial.
So, kudos to your 2012 initiative and to the Open Curriculum initiative. Now, wouldn't it be great if there was collaboration between both of them?
Btw, one of my gripes is the individual effort it takes to know and keep up with the statuses in Drupal 7 (and soon 8) of modules that I have made extensive (or even casual) use of in Drupal 6.
Regards to all,
Bob
There is collaboration
There is collaboration between them (at least for the project I talk about in my comment above, which is the offsite documentation as listed in the wiki). I've been liaising with both the docs team and the skill sets team to figure out how the solution can work for both cases.
Just a quick data point,
Just a quick data point, talking to a freelancer of the builder/configurator type: he had no prolem finding answers to either simple (generic, forum) or expert (very specific, issue queue) questions. He had the biggest issues with the things inbetween, which roughly translates to 'best practices given a (not too) specific use case. To me it sounded like a wish for intermediate level tutorials.
And a quick
Good to know
Thanks yoroy -- that is good to know. ... Can you give an example of questions your freelancer couldn't answer?
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
What's the next step?
2012 is almost 1/12 over... I'm just wondering what I (or anyone else interested) can do to make this initiative actually happen. What's the next step? Are we waiting for something to happen at the DA before we can take any action?
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
Happy to help
I posted up above there and volunteered to help. I am a site builder and themer(not advanced by any means), and designer/graphic artist. I am not a coder, and I have learned Drupal from square one(couldn't have without the help and the community and developers of which I have a great amount of respect and appreciation for). I was originally a designer(print/logo), then learned html and started with frontpage(back in the day:). I then looked into cms systems like Wordpress, Joomla, etc.., but became quickly frustrated with the lack of integration between addons/extensions, the inability to customize or produce a scalable site, and often the cost of reaching that conclusion. I switched to Drupal years ago and have never looked back. I am constantly learning. I know and remember the initial excitement of all drupal has to offer, but quickly realized the learning curve(for example views,panels,rules...). The learning curve is well worth it for anything, but I can also see how many could give up as well. I also have had the question asked so many times: what modules should I use? And I have to honestly reply: "It depends on the type of site you are building(present and future goals included), how much your clients want to be involved if you have clients, and sometimes personal preference with the choice of tools and strategy you use. Just to name a few considerations" This is a true, yet not a direct or definitive answer for anyone and I have had the same question myself. I am a strong supporter and a Solutions Directory(check out the Drupal Association Ideascale site- the idea was posted there) and of a multi-level mentoring program with resources that promote self-learning, but also provides the much needed one on one support.
I say all this say I would be happy to assist and also offer any feedback from a site builders perspective.