What's new on Drupal.org - October 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.

Announcement

New issue shortcuts and friendly url structure

Drupal contributors have been managing bug fixes, feature requests, and code reviews on Drupal.org for around 15 years now. Passing an issue node id around a sprint table is a stable of DrupalCon and camps around the world. In October we announced that we would be implementing some changes to the issue url structure, as well as some shortcuts to help users navigate to issues more easily.

URL Pattern for issues:

https://drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2922626
When an issue is moved between projects the alias will be updated.

Shortcuts

The search bar will now automatically redirect you to a node if you enter its id directly:

A new menu callback will help you get to issues with a shorter url string:
https://drupal.org/i/<nid>

And of course you can still use the old https://drupal.org/node/<nid> urls if you still have them bookmarked.

Spoiler alert: These shortcuts and new url patterns were deployed in November and you can use them right now!

Drupal.org updates

Composer instructions on release pages

To make it easier for site builders to figure out how to use a release with composer we've added the composer command line instructions to release pages.

This command installs the package with the current release number specified as a minimum version parameter. We also provide a link to the documentation on using Composer to manage Drupal site dependencies, to help users who may be unfamiliar with Composer learn how to use it.

The Community Section

The community is the heart of the Drupal project, but until now community news has not had it's own place to live. We've now made the community page a proper section with its own blog, so that community posts and CWG information has a dedicated place to live.

When the first posts in this new section go live, we'll add this blog feed to Drupal Planet as well. Over time, we hope to further refine the community section and improve the tools we provide for the community to connect with each other.

WYSIWYG for Forums (CKEditor)

We're always looking for ways to make improvements to the site that have a high impact to effort ratio. One such change was enabling the CKEditor for editing in the forums. CKEditor has been in the wild as a WYSIWYG editor on Drupal.org for other content types for quite a while now, and we felt confident it was ready for use on forums as well.

Bug-fix: Dev releases on project pages

In the runup to DrupalCon Vienna we made a number of improvements to project pages - however a bug or two crept in as well. A race condition was causing dev releases not to display in some cases, and we resolved this issue in October. If you're a project maintainer on Drupal.org and see anything else go missing, please let us know!

Infrastructure

DrupalCI: Faster, more affordable testing

DrupalCI uses spot requests on Amazon Web Services to spin up testbots on-demand for the Drupal project. In the past, instances were provisioned in minimum increments of one hour, meaning to make the most of testing we had to queue up tests to reuse the remainder of any paid-for instance-hours.

Because AWS has enabled per-second billing, we no longer have to try to fill instance-hours, and so we have reconfigured our spot instance requests to provision testbots faster, while still saving money overall compared to the previous configuration.

DrupalCI: More efficient RTBC testing

We also discovered that a bug in our automated RTBC retesting system was triggering more tests than necessary. We've fixed the bug, and now only the most appropriate recent test/environment will be retested for RTBC issues.

Server Maintenance Windows

Finally, we scheduled several maintenance windows in cooperation with our infrastructure services partner to schedule updates/restarts of our servers.

If you want to keep up-to-date with Drupal.org-related changes and maintenance windows you can subscribe to our Change Notices, or follow us on Twitter.

https://t.co/57fE1VZHTn db maintenance window is complete. We may schedule a follow up maint window, and will notify here if needed.

— Drupal infra (@drupal_infra) October 31, 2017

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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. 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