A New Drupal.org!
In case you missed it, drupal.org got a big face lift this week. This is the culmination of a couple years of work by a lot of people and is a much needed improvement. So what is new? Obviously the first thing people will notice is the new theme in Blue Cheese. The new theme is very refreshing after the old theme getting so old and clunky. The next thing you may notice is an overhauled home page. The old home page was very developer centric and listed the latest stable drupal releases and how many bugs were outstanding in the bug tracking system. While this was nice for developers, more than likely the vast majority of people weren't looking for this information and may have been scared by the prominent placement of bugs. The new home page is geared more towards people trying to find out more about drupal, including sections on "Why Choose Drupal?" and who is using drupal. If you look at all the other links, they are now chosen to give a sense of how much is being done regularly around drupal. Showing off that there are thousands of code commits and multiple thousands of issue comments every week goes to show that we are a very vibrant and thriving community. Also prominent now is a big search box top and right of the home page. Drupal.org now has extensive Apache Solr search built in and will even search across the variousl drupal.org websites. A big new addition is the "Marketplace" link at the top right hand corner. I don't remember ever seeing anything like this before on the old site. It helps steer interested people towards resources when they need them. This is probably the start of a more extensive system for finding help with drupal. Previously there was no proper official way of finding resources. If you log in, you will see the new user dashboard page. This is a replacement for the simple pages that listed everything you had commented on. It includes new drag and drop moving the blocks around without the need to save (similar to igoogle or yahoo home pages). It also allows you to customize what areas of the drupal development you want to look in on. If you go to a project page, you are presented with a link to add the project's issue queue to your dashboard page. I think there is a lot of potential here but I'm not sure if everything is fully done yet. Hopefully this will get better and more useful with time. Finally, there is a new layout to project pages. Where information is displayed and where links are have all changed. I'm not sure if it is just being so long accustomed to the old layout but I'm having trouble finding what I need in the new layout. I'm sure I'll either get used to this over time or it will get fixed because lots of people notice it. Overall this is a great and much needed update to drupal.org. Hopefully this will lay the foundation for ever greater change to come. A special thankyou to all those people that have worked so hard on this.
