Study: .gov web sites should focus on RSS, XML—not redesigns

Yes. Although I think some restructuring will be necessary as well, having good meta-data both for inter-site usage and for people to use themselves should avoid having to micro-manage a lot of stuff - since it'll be easy to change things around as needs evolve.

As someone who's still fairly new to the Drupal community, I think that Drupal.org will be where many people go first to find information, whether they are evaluating Drupal's suitability for their needs, installing it, looking to add modules, or getting help.

The site navigation should be changed to answer the questions that each of these audiences have: for those who are evaluating, quick links to case studies; for those who are installing, a page with the latest version, installation walkthrough, and recommended next steps; for those who are adding to their installation, a walkthrough providing links to the most common modules for particular use cases; for those who are getting help, a handbook that is structured around accomplishing tasks, rather than describing features.

Providing good metadata for sites like drupalmodules.com is definitely part of the picture, but having good information architecture on Drupal.org is also essential. For one thing, it's a good advertisement for Drupal to see right off that it is capable of making a usable website.

In a quick review of CMS websites, it looks like most of them aren't very good. Out of Vignette, Joomla, Plone, WordPress, and Movable Type, WordPress is the only one that has a homepage which is well-crafted for those who are evaluating the product: clearly describing the benefits of their platform, its major users, and how to install. But for the other audiences I mentioned, their site also gets confusing quite quickly, necessitating the use of search. If Drupal.org can be structured in such a way that people can get to the information they need without having to search, then we'll be ahead of pretty much everyone else out there.