Drupal.org team week notes #19

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Recently we published our Tech team plan for the first quarter of 2014. To ensure that we are not only telling you about our plans, but also update on the progress as we go, we are bringing back our traditional bi-weekly ‘week notes’ posts. Welcome to the first week notes of 2014!

Drupal 7 upgrade cleanup

We managed to fix quite a few critical and major issues in the past 2 weeks. Project usage and download statistics are now fixed, text search is improving, root cause of the missing Git commits on Drupal.org is also fixed (thanks marvil07 for help!), so we hope to close a few related issues soon.

We have only one critical issue left and one critical D.o UX issue, both of which are our top priority for the next two weeks.

If you wanna help us finish the clean up sooner, here are the few issues you are welcome to work on:

BDD tests

D7 staging site needs some work to improve its stability, before we can setup regular BDD test runs. We’ve been working on this on and off during the past 2 weeks, not done yet, but slowly getting there.

Public Bluecheese

Transition to the public plus private (which includes branded elements) versions of Bluecheese finished. There is now a public repository, which should make it much easier for people to contribute to Drupal.org. Public version of the theme doesn’t look exactly like the full theme and it won’t be supported as installable theme for other sites. However it does just enough for it’s purpose, which is making it easier for volunteers to contribute to Drupal.org. We’d like to thank Lewis Nyman and Melissa Anderson for their help on this project.

Drupal.org changes tool

The tool is under development. The first step is upgrading infrastructure.drupal.org to Drupal 7, which is almost done. A few pieces left, for example, porting bounce_handler to Drupal 7, which is being done by Ricardo Amaro (thanks!).

Setting up OpenStuck cluster

In the past two weeks the server has been installed and initially configured with OpenStack Havana thanks to help from Jason Ford and the team at Blackmesh. We are continuing to configure the server this week, we have added a base instance image, and have requested a new VLAN for the cluster. The next steps to finish configuration are setting locking down firewalls, setting up web access and working through issues that crop up along the way.

Moving db4 to the new server

This move will let us create a high availability MySQL cluster for Drupal.org subsites. Currently the new db4 is being configured and should be in production soon.

Moving devdb to another server

This is now finished! Devdb now has a much better hardware and we’ve got 2x space for our development environments.

Drupal Store

The store on association.drupal.org is in progress, we are now testing the first prototype.

Drupal Job Board

We are still collecting proposals for the Drupal Job Board, take a look at this post for more details on the RFP. Proposals will be accepted through February 7, 2014.

Lastly, there is one more thing we are working towards improving for Drupal.org, which wasn't in our Q1 plan post, and that is getting better at tracking various Drupal.org metrics...

Drupal.org dashboard

At the end of 2013 we've made a list of stats we'd like to track for Drupal.org. Some of them are the ones listed in the Drupal Association's 2014 Leadership Plan, but there are also a lot of additional userful metrics. Later this year, around June, we are planning to automate the process and make the stats available as a pretty dashboard somewhere, e.g. https://drupal.org/metrics. However until we automate this, we decided to collect the stats manually once per month, to ensure we have the data. On January 1st we pulled the data for the first time, and you can find various stats for December 2013 and the whole 2013 year in this Drupal.org 2013 Dashboard. We will publish the stats for January in our week notes in February, and we'll do so every month. We hope this will be of use not only for the staff but for the community at large!

This is it for the week notes today. Follow us on Twitter for updates and expect the next post in 2 weeks!