Drupal.org blog: What’s new on Drupal.org – Q3 2022

Posted on by Michael G

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Read our roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community. You can also review the Drupal project roadmap.

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Our update for the third quarter of 2022 includes some exciting highlights from DrupalCon Prague in September, a progress report on the GitLab Acceleration Initiative, small improvements to help bring the community together, and more. 

Did you miss the chance to attend DrupalCon Europe in Prague? Don’t worry, most of the excellent content is available on the Drupal Association YouTube channel. Almost 50% of the attendees in Prague were new to DrupalCon, an amazing milestone that shows just how healthy the Drupal ecosystem in Europe really is. 

With so many hours of recordings, maybe you’d prefer to check out our event recap for some of the highlights. 

DrupalCon Prague - Bridge logo

Drupal.org Updates

#Driesnote Highlights

The major theme of the #Driesnote at DrupalCon Prague was how the community is making Drupal easier to use and easier to innovate, with information about Automatic Updates, the Project Browser, and the GitLab initiative.

Watch the full #Driesnote 

The Drupal Association has direct involvement in each of these three initiatives, alongside all of the community contributors and organizations participating. 

If you or your organization is interested in supporting these or other initiatives, please feel free to read up on the official initiative pages to learn how to participate. 

GitLab Acceleration Updates

Drupal.org blog: What’s new on Drupal.org - Q2 2022We want to highlight section of the #Driesnote in particular, Drupal Association team member @fjgarlin gave a significant update on the process of moving Drupal.org issues to GitLab issues, and the full migration code is now written and waiting for the additional pieces of the puzzle (issue credit, CI). 

To increase the rate of innovation in Drupal, the Association is putting a heavy emphasis on the tools we use to contribute. With three pillars of issues, contribution credit, and CI testing each nearly ready to go, we’ll be seeing rapid adoption of the new tools in the coming months. 

GitLab server upgrades

As contribution activity ramped up prior to the first Drupal 10 beta release and DrupalCon Prague, it quickly became clear that our GitLab hosting environment was struggling with the increased load. 

The Drupal Association has historically hosted a majority of our infrastructure at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, on bare metal virtual machine hosts that we maintain. We use this in combination with a more modern cloud infrastructure hosted on AWS. While we see significant savings hosting with the OSL, there is clear value in making strategic investments in faster infrastructure for our communities collaboration tools.

Together with our infrastructure management partners at Tag1, we significantly scaled up the server infrastructure backing our GitLab instance: 

GitLab Server Up-sizing

Time and money invested in speeding up our GitLab instance directly translates into time saved for thousands of contributors to the Drupal project (and to their employers billable hours). 

It’s a much simpler thing than adding new contribution features, but it’s a good reminder that investing purely in performance can have a really positive impact on our community. 

Training Marketplace: Recognizing Contribution

Managing the Drupal.org marketplace is one of the more crucial responsibilities of the Drupal Association. Recent efforts have been focused on recognizing the hard work that organizations do to contribute to the project, by sponsoring the time of their team members to give back. For a long time, many of our training partners have also been tremendous contributors, and we’re now factoring that into the ranking of organizations in the training marketplace. 

By sorting our training partners in order of contributions, we not only reward those organizations that contribute the most with more business, but we also promote those training companies that will hopefully include contribution training as part of their curriculum, bringing in new contributors to our community. 

Drupal 9( and 10!) Updates for Drupal.org

We’re often asked when Drupal.org itself is going to be updated to Drupal 9 (or at this point, Drupal 10!). Historically, with most major version updates of Drupal, Drupal.org is one of the last sites to migrate. This is because Drupal.org has a lot of bespoke tools that we are the sole maintainers of, and so it takes us a little bit longer to get things ready. 

We’re happy to say, several sites are in pre-production, ready for deployment soon, including: 

  • api.drupal.org
  • events.drupal.org 
  • localize.drupal.org (thanks to the community!) 

Groups.drupal.org is going to have functionality moved directly into Drupal.org, where it can be more easily connected with systems like the community/events portal and the contribution recognition system. 

Finally, we have designs and front-end work for Drupal.org itself, just about ready to go thanks to our partnership with Third and Grove. 

Drupal.org needs to be a showcase of the best that Drupal can be. As the ‘front door’ of the Drupal ecosystem, we want to make a great first impression on Drupal evaluators, developers, and organizations who may want to build their business on Drupal. 

Contribution Dashboard for Organizations

Every Drupal.org organization profile now has a contribution dashboard that can be viewed only by the user who owns the profile. This is an important feature addition to help make current and prospective members of the Drupal Certified Partner program more aware of their current progress towards increasing their contributions. 

Organization Contribution Dashboard

This ‘Owner tools’ dashboard provides an at-a-glance look at an organization’s contribution status, including:

  • Weighted contribution credit in the last 12 months
  • Case study count
  • Supporting partner level

And critically, highlights the progress towards the next tier of partnership.

If you are the node-owner for your organization profile, look for the ‘Owner tools’ link at the top of the page. 

Community Events Improvements

In collaboration with the Events Organizer Working Group, we’ve made additional improvements  to drupal.org/community/events in Q3. 

Because of the return of in-person events as Covid moves from pandemic to endemic, it’s more important than ever to provide a central repository for all of the activity happening in the Drupal community. 

In particular, with Drupal 10 just over the horizon, we focused on adding support for ‘Contribution Events‘.

The new ‘contribution events’ category was used to support several highly successful ‘Drupal 10 porting days’ to help get the module ecosystem ready for the upcoming release of Drupal 10. 

You’ll also see Drupal 10 release parties being added – so if you’re looking to join (or host!) a Drupal 10 launch event, check out drupal.org/community/events. 

Regional Filters for Case Studies

Last but not least, we fulfilled a long-time request to add the ability to filter Drupal.org case studies by region. Just prior to DrupalCon Prague we were able to slip in this functionality. 

Regional case study filter

For partners hoping to show new clients case studies in the same regions they operate, it should now be much easier, and for end-users looking to see organizations like them who already use Drupal, it should be easier than ever. 

.. and after that?

We’re well into Q4 2022 as this blog is getting posted. So what else will be coming soon? The major milestone on everyone’s mind is the impending release of Drupal 10, targeted for 14 Dec, 2022. A major part of the Drupal Association team’s efforts in Q4 has been on support for Drupal 10 readiness, particularly with the Drupal testing infrastructure. But that’s not all – and you’ll need to tune in to our Q4 update in early 2023 to get all the highlights. 

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As always, we’d like to thank all the volunteers who work with us and the Drupal Association Supporters who help to fund our work. In particular, we want to thank: 

If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal Association. 

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

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