What's new on Drupal.org? - January 2017

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.

Drupal.org updates

Recognizing more types of contribution in the Drupal.org Marketplace

We were very pleased to announce an expansion of the issue credit system into a broader contribution credit system which recognizes more than just code contributions for the purposes of ranking organizations in the marketplace.

We now calculate the following 4 types of contribution into overall contribution credit:

User research for the upcoming industry pages

In a previous blog post on Drupal.org, we talked about our increasing focus on the adoption journey and our plans to create industry specific landing pages on Drupal.org. In January we did extensive user research with people in media and publishing, higher education, and government, which will be the first industries we promote. We're hoping to launch these pages very soon, so keep an eye on the home page.

Preparing for community elections for the Drupal Association board

The elections process for the community seats on the Drupal Association board kicks off with self-nominations in February each year. This means that we dedicated some time in January to making small refinements and improvements to the nomination process. In particular we've added more in-context educational materials about the board to the self-nomination form, including a video by executive director Megan Sanicki. We've also refined our candidate questions to help candidates express their unique qualifications.

If you're interested in bringing your perspective to the Drupal Association board, please nominate yourself.

Membership history messaging

To make it easier for members to understand their membership history, we've added new messaging to the membership join and renew pages. Users who go to join or renew their Drupal Association membership will now see a message indicating their current membership expiration date, their last contribution amount, a link to contribute again, and their auto-renewal status.

Migration of Drupal Association content to Drupal.org

In January we also migrated the majority of content from assoc.drupal.org to a new section on Drupal.org itself. This effort is part of our larger content restructure initiative. By moving Drupal Association content into Drupal.org we hope to increase discoverability of information about the DA, and create a tighter integration between Drupal Association news and the front-page news feed.

DrupalCI

Checkstyle results now available on the DrupalCI dispatcher

Thanks to community member mile23, DrupalCI now supports automated code style testing. To see checkstyle results for any test on Drupal.org, click on the test result bubble and then click the 'view results' link to view the detailed test results on DrupalCI's jenkins dispatcher.

We're still gathering input and feedback for this initial release of the checkstyle feature, as we decide how to integrate the checkstyle results more tightly with Drupal.org. If you have feedback or suggestions please leave your comments in this issue: #1299710: [meta] Automate the coding-standards part of patch review.

Updated testing environments

DrupalCI supports testing code against a matrix of php and database versions. In January we updated the php environments that DrupalCI supports, so that you can test against the minimum supported versions or the latest point releases. Our 5.X containers have been upgraded to the latest version for each minor release (5.3.29, 5.4.45, 5.5.38, 5.6.29). The singular PHP 7 environment that we were using was following the 7.0.x branch of php7. This has now been expanded into four php 7 environments, 7.0 (7.0.14), 7.1 (7.1.0), 7.0.x, and 7.1.x.

The dev versions of php are primarily intended for Core to sense upstream changes to php before they become released, as our comprehensive test suite often finds unanticipated bugs in php7. Additionally some missing features in the php7 containers were added, specifically apcu.

Local testing improvements

DrupalCI has always supported local testing, in order to allow developers to test changes on their own machines. This is helpful for several reasons: it allows people to test on their own machines before triggering one of the DrupalCI test bots, it lets users troubleshoot failing tests, and it helps to eliminate the 'works on my machine' problem where code appears to work in a local environment, but fails on the test bots.

To make local testing even easier, DrupalCI now automatically generates a vagrant environment for local testing. To use this functionality simply clone the drupalci_testrunner.git repo and then run $ vagrant up from within the directory. Furthermore, DrupalCI can download a build.yml file from a dispatcher.drupalci.org url to replicate any test that has been run on Drupal.org. More information about this will be added to the DrupalCI documentation soon.

Adding test priority

DrupalCI runs thousands of tests of the Drupal codebase for core and contrib modules every month. These tests include commit and patch testing for the active development which may be occurring at any time day or night, as well as the hundreds of daily regression tests run for both core and contrib projects. To help make testing more responsive, we've added a notion of testing priority. When there is a queue of waiting tests, Drupal 8 core patch tests will take priority; followed by D8 branch tests; followed by D8 contrib tests; followed by Drupal 7 patch, branch, and contrib tests.

Community Initiatives

Project Applications Revamp

Our primary community initiative priority for the first quarter of the new year is the Project Application Revamp. There are four phases to the revamp: 1) preserving security advisory coverage signals about projects, 2) transitioning security advisory coverage to an opt-in process, 3) opening the gates to allow any user to promote a project to full and create releases, 4) building new tools to incentivize code review and provide code quality signals on project pages. One of the changes we made as part of phase 1 was to adjust the way recommended releases are highlighted on Drupal.org project pages.

Contrib Documentation Migration

Project maintainers are now able to create documentation guides on their projects using the new documentation content types. Maintainers can then migrate their old documentation content into these new guides, or create new documentation pages. For more information about this process, please consult our guide to contrib documentation.

Help port Dreditor features to Drupal.org

Are you a Drupal.org power user who relies on Dreditor? Markcarver is currently leading the charge to port Dreditor features to Drupal.org, and invites anyone interested in contributing to join him in #dreditor on freenode IRC or the Dreditor GitHub.

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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects.

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