Drupal.org Improvements

The aim of this discussion is to begin the early stages of talking about what modules need to be updated and while patches need to be committed to D7 core in order for the process of upgrading Drupal.org and related web properties to Drupal 7 to begin.

This is an important stage at which to identify any blockers to the upgrade because it will allow us to head off risk more effectively and find a realistic timeline for completing the upgrade.

Leading Drupal's migration from CVS to Git made something eminently clear to me (and eliza411, the migration's PM): there's a lot that's broken about how we manage, maintain, and improve drupal.org (and its subsites). Since then, I've been gradually chatting up more and more people with the idea that we could build a structured, participatory model for updating and adding new features to drupal.org. And that if we do it right, it could become a best-practice model for (Drupal) site management (open, participatory) workflows.

The Community and Support section on drupal.org needs some love (http://drupal.org/community)

Here's some ideas to improve the C&S section. Thoughts and suggestions welcome here and on the issues themselves... though it maybe be more cohesive to discuss here first!

• Remove 'Recent activity'... it's often full of people having problems and frustrations which isn't welcoming!
• Imagery or smiley photos from drupal events etc. A community is people! or a world map of Drupal meetups or events (pie in the sky!)

Without a doubt, there is a lot of content improvements that need to be made to drupal.org, e.g.

• node cleanup based on feedback from the audit
• updating the landing pages e.g. the About page
• the eventual migration of showcase/case studies to new content type
• Community spotlights

Feedback on the Content Overview is appreciated too : http://groups.drupal.org/node/144984

What do you need to contribute?

Oops. I can't believe I said that.

Drupal has a long tradition of insisting that everybody's contribution is equal, that every piece of content is equal. We have to stop that.

It's nearly impossible to find the critical content on d.o and has been for a very long time. How do we fix this? Enlist the community.

Here are some broad brushstrokes:

1. Differentiate content.
   • Use flag module to mark content as useful, mark it as spam, mark comments as issue summaries, mark modules and themes as "I use this" and lots of other things.

Understanding user behavior using Google Analytics.
To do the same we will need to take small steps in the way drupal.org code is rendered as detailed below:

We did it! Auditing phase now over.

A Drupal.org content audit will help us determine what we content have, where it is, and what work it needs (whether it's redundant, outdated or just not worthy). I haven't determined if this project should exclude Documentation book nodes, which obviously add a lot more nodes to the mix!

This content audit will be the first step towards a content strategy for Drupal.org.

The number of visits to Drupal.org has increased by 4.4% due to organic search traffic, excluding the buzz about the launch.

The project landing pages for /modules and /themes have a 20% lower bounce rate.

The get-started page, http://drupal.org/getting-started, has a 71% bounce rate versus the new get started page, http://drupal.org/start, which has a bounce rate of 34%

The pivots recommendations for projects resulted in a 20% lower bounce rates site wide. Pivots recommendations was disabled in the redesign launch, but will be relaunched shortly.