Introduction

We've been quietly working on an exciting initiative for Drupal fans everywhere. Today we are launching a new drupal.org web site - groups.drupal.org. This site is for geographic groups like Vancouver and working groups like Views developers. The site provides each group with their own mini-site, where subscribers can post messages and collect replies.

Logging in

You are welcome to login using your drupal.org username and password. Remember to append @drupal.org to the username. Note that your email address will not be copied over, so you'll want to edit your profile after you login.

Notifications

There are three useful tracker pages offered by the site (there is only 1 tab if you are not logged in). You may also collect links for RSS feeds from each tracker page. Alternatively, each group offers an email subscription feature. With this, you get all nodes and comments posted to the group via email. A helpful reply link is in each email.

Creating groups

We welcome everyone to create groups on the site. Please adhere to the guidelines posted on the creation page.

About

This site showcases some pretty neat technology like Organic groups, signup.module, Casetracker, Views, Localization, and more. Read more.

Feedback

The site has a simple ticketing system for reporting issues. We hope to soon provide each group with its own ticketing area. We also have a feedback form -http://groups.drupal.org/contact.

Status

This site is just leaving alpha stage and entering beta. I don't anticipate a long beta like those wimpy apps Flickr and Gmail. When we leave beta, I will announce this site on drupal.org home page and in newsletters, etc. Meanwhile, feel free to blog about the site and use it heartily. It is most definitely live.

I've been doing a lot of bug fixing in the project module. Soon, I'll be adding a lot of new features, too. Unfortunately, very few people are willing/able to review my patches. However, since the project module is so central to drupal.org, Dries doesn't want me to just commit larger patches without reviews and feedback from other developers (which is smart). So, this is a plea for you to look at:

http://drupal.org/project/issues/project&states=8

A number of annoying bugs on drupal.org's project module have already been solved, but the patches can't be commited until other people look at them. This is a very visible aspect of Drupal, and if it's buggy, people will think Drupal isn't mature enough for their needs. Please, help make drupal.org's issue tracking a first-class system.

This language lacks the .po file for the organic groups module, which is a very much used module here. Thus, you will not be able to see the groups pages in that language until we have a translation for this module.

Do you speak Brazilian Portuguese? you can help us to fully support this language within this site. Use the .pot file (follow the link you will find in the sticky post of this group to get it) to create a new translation.

I'm looking for a few volunteers to look at new groups as they are created and approve them when they meet these conditions:

• have readable names, descriptions, etc.
• are not overlapping too much with existing groups
• are properly categorized (working group vs. geographical group vs. ?)

These guidelines will be further developed over time. If you are interested, please reply here or send me an email. This will be a big gift to our community, and your name will be mentioned on the forthcoming About page.

The site is coming along. We just enhanced the Recent Posts tab so that shows you unread messages in your subscribed groups. Thats just purrfect.

Note that creation of new groups is limited to just a few beta testers. We are not ready to open up group creation just yet. When we do, groups will be subject to some minimal approval. We don't want duplicates and want to keep tidy our group names, descriptions, etc.

Thanks to everyone for being patient with this site. When I proposed the site last fall, I had no idea the demand would be this great. We're plugging away at the final todo items

I'm half way though an enhancement to organic groups module where a group admin can pick a group locale. I need a volunteer who will figure out what languages are in good enough shape to install on this site. This person should also field requests for new languages, and update existing languages as their translations mature.

I'm pretty excited that we'll finally have a showcase site for Drupal's localization features. Also, Mozilla Group specifically asked for this feature for one of their sites and i just love paying them back.

This site will become a glorious hub of worldwide drupal user groups