Under the hood of Drupal.org

In October 2010, the Drupal.org redesign was launched. This was the culmination of a multi-year process, and a major milestone for the Drupal community.

This session will shine some light under the hood of the *.drupal.org infrastructure. We’ll give you a brief tour of the hardware and software that powers one of the largest and most active Drupal community sites in existence. We’ll look at some of the tools we use to manage the sites and our development and staging workflows. We’ll talk about the process we used to develop and launch a major redesign on a site that gets roughly a million visitors a week (and over 5 million page views a week).

We’ll give a brief tour of some of the fancy new features of the redesigned drupal.org, including the map on the front page and the per-user dashboard. We’ll also look at some of the planned new features that didn’t make it into the initial launch -- the “what next?” list.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ll talk about how you can help contribute improvements to drupal.org. We know this is a very large, very complicated site, with a lot of moving pieces, so we want to help demystify the inner workings and make it easier for anyone to jump in and contribute. Have ideas for new dashboard widgets? Know about Solr and want to see more powerful search functionality? Want to improve the issue queues? Come find out how to turn your ideas into realities!

Note: as a companion to this session, the Drupal.org Infrastructure Team is planning to host a BoF session to do hands-on training on contributing to *.drupal.org, including setting up local development environments, navigating issue queues, and so on.