Drupal 7.11 and 6.23, maintenance releases which fix security vulnerabilities are now available for download.

Drupal 7.12 and 6.24 also fix other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list, a history of all security advisories, and an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 and 6 include the built-in Update status module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

Bug reports

Both Drupal 7.x and 6.x branches are being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Changelog

Drupal 7.11 only includes fixes for security issues. (Note: Be sure to review the known issues for 7.11 below.) Drupal 7.12 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 7.10 and 7.12 releases can be found by reading the 7.12 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Drupal 6.23 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 6.24 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 6.22 and 6.24 releases can be found by reading the 6.24 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 6.x branch can be found at git commit log.

Security vulnerabilities

Drupal 7.11 and 6.23 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:

• SA-CORE-2012-001

To fix the security problem, please upgrade Drupal.

What is included with each release?

We made two versions of both Drupal 7 and 6 available, so you can choose to only include security fixes (Drupal 7.11 and 6.23 respectively) or security fixes and bugfixes (Drupal 7.12 and 6.24). You can choose your preferred version. We are trying to make it easier and quicker to roll out security updates by making security-only releases available as well as ones with bugfixes included. We hope this helps you roll out the fixes as soon as possible. Read more details in the handbook.

Update notes

The default.settings.php file was changed in Drupal 7.12, to add documentation about PDO attribute override capabilities that were added as a result of #1309278: Make PDO connection options configurable.

The robots.txt file was changed in Drupal 6.24 to block filter tips from search engines. The .htaccess and (default.)settings.php files were not changed in Drupal 6. Additionally, indexes were added to the node_comment_statistics and comment tables, for performance.

Known issues #

Drupal 7

The Drupal 7.11 release is only an incremental release off of Drupal 7.9, instead of 7.10, so it is missing bug fixes introduced in 7.10. Administrators are encouraged to update to 7.12 as soon as possible. See #1430404: Drupal 7.11 is missing all the bug fixes from Drupal 7.10 for details.

Drupal 7.12 is also only compatible with Menu Block 7.x-2.3 and higher, and Internationalization (i18n) 7.x-1.4 and higher.

Drupal 6

In Drupal 6.24, if you have the contributed user_delete module enabled on your site, the update will fail with a Cannot redeclare user_delete_access() error. An update of user_delete module is being worked on.

In Drupal 6.24 if you had locale module enabled earlier, but it is not currently turned on, the update will fail with Call to undefined function locale_inc_callback(). A fix is being worked on for Drupal core.

In Drupal 6.24 if you run your updates with Drush, you might experience duplicate entry errors in your system table. See the ongoing discussion at http://drupal.org/node/1425868

Elections for at large Drupal Association elections are kicking into high gear with two all candidates meetings this week before voting opens Friday.

Election candidates will participate in all candidates meetings are scheduled over the next two days (Wed., Thurs. or Fri., depending on your location). The first meeting, intended to work for people in the Asia and the Pacific, is scheduled for 01:00 UTC on Thursday. That's 5 PM PST on Wednesday for those in the US and Canada.

The second all candidates meeting at 17:00 UTC Thursday is timed for participants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Then on Friday voting will open. Details on voting will be posted to association.drupal.org.

See the elections announcement for more on how to learn about the candidates.

The final session selections for DrupalCon Denver were announced this week. DrupalCon will take place March 19-23, 2012. Get your tickets soon so that you don't miss out on over 100 sessions across 8 tracks! This year we have added tracks specifically for Non-profit, Government & Education, in addition to Community, Commerce, Mobile, Design & User Experience, Business & Strategy, Coding & Development, Site Building, and Core Conversations.

Conference Dates:
March 19 - Pre-conference trainings -- over 16 from beginners to advanced + API Hack-a-thon

March 20 - 22 - Three complete days of 104 sessions starting with Keynotes: Dries Buytaert, Founder of Drupal and Drupal Project lead, Mitchell Baker, chairperson for the Mozilla Foundation, and Luke Wroblewski, digital product leader coming to talk about mobile.

March 22 - Drupal Means Business - included with conference registration to learn how to integrate Drupal into your business.

March 23 - All-day Contribution Sprint -- one of the largest anywhere!

Plus, parties, ski trips, networking, contests and more, all for the $350 conference fee! Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for helping this to remain one of the lowest cost open source conferences around.

Get your ticket to DrupalCon Denver today. What are you waiting for? We want to see you in Denver!

P.S. Conference registration is $350 until February 21 or when tickets are gone! Early registration helps us to plan the conference and keep our costs low by only ordering what is needed. A limited number of 1/2-priced student tickets are still available.

Follow @drupalcon on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

Introduction

Drupal.org has over 725,000 registered members in 228 countries. However, only a very small percentage of this members contribute back to the project. Why is this? How can we attract more contributors? What can we do to make it easier for people to contribute? Which areas of the Drupal project would people want to contribute?

To get answers to these questions, two surveys were conducted in 2011 by the community to understand the experience of contributing or considering to contribute to the Drupal project.

This is a combined report of 358 respondents’ responses to the surveys.

Methodology

The first survey focused on the Drupal contribution experience for the Prairie initiative and received 303 responses. It was written and conducted by Leisa Reichelt (leisareichelt) that ran from April 25, 2011 to September 20, 2011.

The second, the Getting Involved survey, [list of questions] received 55 responses. It was written and conducted by Heather James (heather), Dharmesh Mistry (dcmistry) and Lisa Rex (lisarex) from October 21, 2011 to November 9, 2011. This survey focused on the respondent’s Drupal profile; their expectations, roadblocks, motivations; and Drupal areas that need most contributors, among many other things.

Profile of the respondents

Prairie Survey

Of the 303 respondents, 64% were non-coders and 31% were non-active contributors.
A big majority (71%) of the respondents from the survey identified themselves as “an established, active member of the community”. The majority of the respondents regularly contribute (41%) and a good amount stated that they contribute occasionally (36%). The majority of the non-active contributors (36%) have never contributed to the project.

Getting Involved Survey

The majority of the respondents identified themselves as Site Builder (68%), and/or Developer (59%). A significant portion of respondents identified themselves as Themer (34%) and/or Project Manager (29%). It is also worth noting that 73% of the respondents cited Drupal as their source of income.

Note: Each of the surveys focused on different aspects of Drupal contributions.

Executive Summary

The findings from both surveys are summarized below, but also see:

• Detailed analysis and findings from the Prairie 2011 survey
• Detailed analysis and findings from the Getting Involved 2011 survey

The contributing experience

From the Getting Involved survey, it was found that the big motivator for people to contribute was simply to improve Drupal and support its community (40%). The other motivator was to grow their knowledge and network (25%). However, when the Getting Involved survey asked about their opinion about the existing community structure, a majority of the respondents (48.9%) had a negative reaction. They thought it was fragmented, chaotic, not great and could use improvements.

The majority of respondents of the Prairie survey thought the experience of contributing was:

• “Very much” rewarding and collaborative: Majority of the respondents of the Prairie survey thought the experience of contributing to the Drupal project was “very much” collaborative (47%) and rewarding (46%). However, the non-coders and the non-active contributors either stayed with “somewhat” or swayed between “very much” and “somewhat” with no statistical significance.
• “Not really” to “somewhat” efficient: Majority thought the process of contribution was “not really” efficient (43%) or “somewhat” efficient (40%) with no significant statistical difference between the responses. Non coders shared the same feeling.
• “Somewhat” intimidating, confusing, unwieldy and supportive: The respondents of the second survey thought the experience of contributing to the Drupal project was “somewhat” intimidating (46%), confusing (49%), unwieldy (43%) and supportive (52%).
• Split between “Very much” and “Somewhat” inspiring, exciting and friendly: When asked about the experience of contributing in terms of inspiration, excitement and friendliness, the majority swayed between “very much” and “somewhat” responses with no significant statistical difference. It is worth noting that in all the four categories (Rewarding, Inspiring, Excitement and Friendly), the majority of non-coders and non-active contributors stuck to “somewhat”.

What do people want to contribute?

Respondents of the Getting Involved survey mostly want to contribute on Documentation/technical writing and PHP development/LAMP (54% each). The next area with the most interest is training (46%) and Mentoring/Support (32%).

What areas need the most contributions?

The respondents thought documentation (12 respondents), Drupal.org. (7 respondents) and Design/UX/Usability (6 respondents) needed the most attention from other contributors.

What areas of Drupal community do you think need the most contributions?

Although the respondents from the second survey thought the contributing experience was “very much” collaborative, majority (47%) thought “Redesign the issue page to make it easier to collaborative effectively” as a “very important” initiative. Besides that, the respondents (overall, non coders and non active contributors) agreed (47%) that “Redesigning parts of Drupal.org to help newbies find ways to start contributing” as “very important”. This number was higher for non active contributors (55%) than the others.

Other Findings

Across profiles (of the second survey), “Creating ‘team’ pages to aggregate activities and people interested in a topic” (48%) and “Designing better tools for planning large initiatives” (41%) were deemed as “quite important”.

For “Designing a reputation system to show what different people are expert in and how well they are known by the Drupal community” majority of respondents swayed between quite important (32%) to less important (39%). This was also true for non coders and non active contributors.

Roadblocks to contributing

The major roadblock from they getting involved was lack of information on how to get involved (and whom to contact) (42%). This issue of getting started (48%) was also found in the Prairie survey.

• Lack of information on how to contribute, what to work on or whom to contact (42%)
• Don’t have time (18%)
• “I don’t know enough technically” (16%)
• Intimidation factor (13%)
• Want to talk/need guidance from mentors (13%)
• Slow turn around time to get feedback/or to get committed (7%)

‘Get Involved’ pages and Drupal.org

Only 16% of the respondents of the Prairie survey visit the ‘Get Involved’ pages on Drupal.org. 46% of Prairie survey respondents took the opportunity to complain about Drupal.org. They wanted a better Drupal.org. (24%), better tools to collaborate (5%), and an efficient issue queue (5%). For Drupal.org., they particularly wanted to find information easily (4%).

How could we improve the experience?

To make the experience of contributing better, non-contributors wanted better information to get started. And the contributors reiterated this when asked what would have been helpful when they started contributing. Besides that, the second most important thing that mattered was the human aspect. The personal touch would have been helpful to the contributors while they were starting and the non contributors want to work with experienced contributors. It is worth noting here that a significant number of respondents are interested in helping with this (Training - 46%, Mentoring/Support - 32%). (Responses from the Getting Involved survey)

Other noteworthy things

• Designers and non-programmers who responded (11) to open-ended question in the Prairie survey complained that contributing to the project was heavily code focused, that designers did not get the credit they deserved, and that they did not know how the non-coders could contribute to the project. Like the respondents from the Getting Involved survey, the non-programmers also reiterated that they did not know where they were needed.
• A small but considerate amount of Prairie survey respondents were discouraged by other community members and slow turn around time (8% each)
• The Getting Involved survey also asked as to what do they expect from a community leader, and they wanted someone who could moderate discussions/issues, offer guidance, and carve a plan for the community.

What do you think about the existing community structure?

Conclusion

We hope the findings from the survey will be helpful to the Drupal Association and the community on the next big priorities for Drupal.org. It is evident from the findings that a significant effort is required to provide effective, easy-to-find information on how to get started with contributing to the Drupal community. However, help from other community members is needed to keep the momentum going.

Next steps

Some conversations/efforts have begun toward this goal of improving the contributor experience, such as redesigning the Community, Support and Getting started landing pages, redesigning the issue queue and more.

We need to identify areas that need leaders, and areas that need contributors. Contributors are in demand for documentation especially.

If you are interested to contribute to this effort to provide better documentation for getting started with contributing, great! There are several open issues on improving Getting Involved content, including the Getting Involved landing page and Getting Involved Guide. Please visit this link to read about other community initiatives that might be of interest to you. If you are unsure where you can best help, please contact Lisa Rex (lisarex), who can point you in the right direction.

If you have any questions about the survey/findings, please feel free to contact Dharmesh Mistry (dcmistry).

Come one, come all! As of January 18, 2012 nominations are open for the 2012 elections of two "at large" directors of the Drupal Association.

The at large directors are intended to represent the Drupal community. Specifics of the election were decided through a community-based process with participation by dozens of Drupal community members. More details are in the proposal that was approved by the Drupal Association board.

Who can vote?

Voting is open to all individuals who have a drupal.org account by the time the elections begin and who have logged in at least once in the past year. These individuals' accounts will be added to the voters list on association.drupal.org and they will have access to the voting.

To vote, you will rank candidates in order of your preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). The results will be calculated using an "instant runoff" method. For an accessible explanation of how instant runoff vote tabulation works, see videos linked in this discussion.

How to run

Candidates needed! If you are considering running, please head over to the nominations page and read up on what's involved. From there you can fill out a candidate profile. You'll be asked for some information about yourself, like why you're running . When the nominations close, your candidate profile will be published and available for Drupal community members to browse. Comments will be enabled, so please monitor your candidate profile so you can respond to questions from community members.

Elections process

Elections will be held from January 30 to February 7, 2012. During this period, you can review and comment on candidate profiles on association.drupal.org and engage all candidates through posting to the Drupal Association group. We'll also be scheduling and announcing two phone-in all candidates meetings, where community members and candidates can ask questions and get to know each other.

Thanks and see you at the polls! We'll post another front-page announcement and announce via @drupal on Twitter when we're ready to go.

Hello from Jennifer, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team leader! It’s time for a quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation team. As you probably heard, Ariane's role in the Documentation Team has changed, and she is no longer my co-leader (sob!), so I'm looking for a new deputy leader or co-leader (watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for details). Here's what Ariane and I oversaw in the Documentation Team at the end of 2011, with a look forward to 2012.

September - December Events

• The Documentation Team is holding weekly ”Documentation Office Hours"—one-hour IRC meetings on Tuesday afternoon (North American time), open to anyone for questions and discussions about contributing to documentation. It seems like it's been very helpful to have a definite time when people can get together on IRC, and we plan to continue with this schedule for the foreseeable future.
• In October, I was able to attend the Friday of the Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp). We had a small documentation sprint, and a few people got up to speed on writing API documentation patches. Also, Kathy (kathyh) spent the afternoon writing a new guide for novice contributors to Drupal core, based on her experiences as a novice contributor -- thanks Kathy!
• We started an API documentation cleanup sprint in November, to bring the Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 core API documentation much more in line with our documentation standards (see meta issue). My big hopes for this sprint:
  1. Lots of documentation cleanup -- YES! The sprint is not finished yet, but MUCH more of our documentation is up to standards. In the process, a lot of weird wording has been fixed, and the documentation is clearer and easier to scan. Also, people usually copy/paste an existing documentation header when creating new documentation (or at least use an existing one as a model), so the more we clean up existing documentation, the better future documentation is likely to be.
  2. Lots of participants -- YES! My hope was that some people new to contributing to Drupal API documentation would see the sprint as a good way to get up to speed on making Drupal patches, and on the API documentation standards. And they did!
  3. Build a Drupal Core Documentation Issue Queue Squad -- Yes! Part-way through the sprint, I put out a call for participants to start reviewing other people's patches as well as creating patches, and they did! And now some of them are helping out with the "documentation" component of the Drupal Core issue queue -- watching for new issues, making patches, reviewing other's patches -- which was my secret hope all along (for the last several years, it's been a rather lonely issue queue, since I have had to either write or review nearly every patch in it -- that model is not sustainable, so I'm really happy to have some company).

  Thanks to xjm, xenophyle, sven.lauer, Lars Toomre, aenw, rc_100, jn2, aspilicious, chris.leversuch, barlantz, synth3tk, agentrickard, ... and probably more who joined after I made this list -- sorry if I forgot your name! This sprint is still going on, so if you’d like to participate, visit the meta issue, which has full instructions (novice contributors welcome!).

Documentation Infrastructure Updates

The last quarter of 2011 saw some changes to Drupal.org that are quite beneficial to Documentation writers, editors, and users -- and more are on the way! Here's a list:

• After much discussion, we came up with an overview plan for how to restructure Drupal documentation into Community, Curated/Help, API, and External Index documentation in September of 2011 (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/175174). During this quarter, we started putting the transformation into place. The first step was a mammoth design issue (190+ comments!) for the Community Documentation (which is a rename of the existing Documentation on Drupal.org in the early fall. The results of that process are partly deployed (read on for details), and more are coming soon.
• One of the main conclusions of the mammoth design issue was that one of the biggest barriers we see to people contributing to the online documentation on drupal.org is reluctance to click the Edit button -- people just aren’t sure whether it’s really OK. So, the redesign of the documentation pages that was deployed in January 2012 included:
  • The existing Documentation pages on Drupal.org have now been renamed "Community Documentation", to reduce the perception that you have to be part of the "documentation team" in order to edit.
  • The page status and other meta-information has been moved to the sidebar
  • At the top, there’s a list of several people who have edited the page, with a clear invitation for you to edit the page.

  Hopefully these changes will help overcome this barrier -- we’ll see!

• We added two taxonomies to Drupal.org documentation pages: keywords and experience level. Right now, they have only been selected on a few pages, but hopefully going forward the keywords will help people find related pages, and the level will help set expectations for the knowledge level needed to understand the page.
• Everyone can now upload images to Drupal.org (issue). Angie/webchick and Daniel/sun made a module that made it safe for people to upload images, and it was deployed in October of 2011. There are followup plans to remove the restrictive Documentation input format from most pages (i.e., to unlock those pages), and to get rid of the Documentation Admin role -- no one should need this role now, since everyone can now upload images and use tables using the default Filtered HTML input format.
• BUEditor was deployed on Drupal.org in October of 2011. This module adds a small toolbar with HTML shortcuts to rich text fields (documentation node bodies, comments, etc.). While this falls short of being a WYSIWYG editor, due to security concerns with existing WYSIWYG modules, this is probably as close as we'll get for the foreseeable future.
• Neil Drumm and Jennifer spearheaded an effort to commit and deploy some updates to the software for api.drupal.org in November 2011 -- thanks to aenw, solotandem, and Greyside for contributing patches for that deployment! If you would like to work on the API module, check out the issue queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/api) or find jhodgdon in IRC to get oriented. A new deployment to api.drupal.org should be coming shortly, with a lot of user interface updates and more new contributors. Stay tuned!

Next Steps

If you're interested in helping with Drupal documentation:

• New contributors: start at http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation to learn all about contributing to documentation, or come to the weekly office hours (see Events section above) to ask questions and get started. (Jennifer recently edited this whole section, so it should be up to date.)
• Drupal Documentation announcements, discussions, and events are posted on http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team and on Twitter (@drupaldocs).
• API documentation cleanup sprint (for programmer-documenters): http://drupal.org/node/1310084
• Work on the API module: http://drupal.org/project/issues/api -- the issues are all prioritized, so look for ones with priority "major" for the current priorities. Or pick up any issue you're interested in -- we won't say No to a good patch.

Hi everybody -

Hope you all had a great holiday, and are easing into 2012 nicely! I'll cut right to the chase with this announcement: effective pretty well immediately (as this has been in the works for a little while now), I'm stepping down as Documentation Co-lead.

Awwww, sad, I know! It's been quite the experience, and I feel like along with Jennifer and the other docs enthusiasts, we've gotten a lot done over the course of the last year and a bit of official leadership term. It's been great helping set the direction of the documentation plans, and working with everyone who's been interested in improving the documentation, as well as many of the core and contrib development teams.

After taking some time off in the summer to decompress and figure out where I wanted to go with all of this, I realized that despite feeling like I've been effective in the position, it's taken a lot of my time away from other things in my life, and from actually writing docs and working on other areas of Drupal. And that was definitely okay for a certain timeframe, but it's not something I want to do forever. Now that the Community Documentation infrastructure changes have been rolled out, my side of the leadership role is effectively being put on hiatus. We've talked this over with Dries, and he also feels it's fine for Jennifer to continue managing the API docs and infra solo.

What does this mean to you all? Probably not any huge changes, I'll still poke my head in on the issue queue, IRC, etc. now and then. But my "official responsibilities" will no longer exist, including hosting Documentation sprints, attending meetings and docs hour, doing docs conference sessions, etc. And when I do work on Docs, it'll more often be in a writing/editing capacity. I'm also hoping to spend some more time doing other fun things like patch reviews for Drupal core, and continuing to attend Drupal events. ...And also, spending more time knitting, socializing, doing yoga, and all those other things I neglected while I was spending all my evenings online!

My time helping lead the project's documentation team has had high points and low points, but overall I feel like I've learned a ton, gotten a lot done, and am leaving the state of the docs in a better place than when I started. That's really all I could hope for! Thanks so much to Jennifer for being an amazing co-lead with whom to share a brain, and to all the fantastic Drupal and docs enthusiasts who've made this experience a positive one.

I hope to see the tentative docs infrastructure plans come to fruition during the coming year. This will result in a small team of dedicated core docs maintainers (including myself) taking over the helm of the future "curated" core docs section, and also see docs maintainers appointed for other contrib projects' curated documentation. And of course, work on API documentation and docs infrastructure will continue; Jennifer and other team members have been focused on this for a while now.

Keep rocking the docs folks, thanks for everything, and I will see you around!

-------------

Jennifer here... I'd like to thank Ariane for a great year of co-leadership! I'm currently planning on staying on as Documentation Team Leader for 2012.

What I'd like to do is take on a deputy leader or co-leader sometime soon (watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for details and an official call for interest/applications). This way we can have a smooth transition to the next documentation leader, and start the trend of time-limited leadership for positions like this in the Drupal community (to prevent burn-out, let new people have a chance to lead, etc.). Anyway, rest assured I'll still be asking Ariane for advice and help, and I'm excited that she's still excited about being involved in documentation in her new capacity!

Jess (Drupal.org username xjm) is a Drupal developer, core contributor, module maintainer, and mentor, and just plain all-around awesome! She is a web developer for the University of Wisconsin's Department of Family Medicine. She also volunteers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

Jess has made many contributions to Drupal, including roles as:

• maintainer of the Taxonomy Access Control and Taxonomy Lineage modules, among others.
• co-maintainer of the Taxonomy module in Drupal core.
• active participant in the API documentation clean-up sprint happening in Drupal 8, as well as efforts to clean up the entity system.
• co-lead of the Clean Up Core community initaitive.
• friendly and knowledgeable mentor to new contributors.
• organizer of the twice-weekly core office hours to help get new core contributors involved.
• inventor of the Issue summary initiative to give new contributors something very valuable but approachable as their first core contribution: reading through and summarizing long, difficult issues to help speed along their review and commit.

Sites she's built with Drupal include the UW Department of Family Medicine's public and intranet websites, an organizational knowledge base, and various small sites.

Jess attended her first DrupalCon in Chicago, and is coming to DrupalCon Denver as well, where she is planning to run an in-person core office hours sprint!

We asked Jess a few questions:

Tell us a bit about yourself! What is your background, or things that interest you outside Drupal?

I love the outdoors. I often bike 30 miles a day in the summer (that's 50 km for those of you using reasonable systems of measurement). I camp, hike, and do ecological restoration, and I probably can identify more plant species than you. ;) I also have other crunchy pastimes like gardening, cooking, and making candles. (I have not yet attempted to weave my own yogurt.)

I read a ridiculous number of books, and I speak bits of five foreign-to-me languages (though I can only carry on a conversation of any substance in French). I think General Relativity is awesome and I love mathematics and statistics.

I'm also a nerd. You probably got that already.

How and why did you start contributing to Drupal core?

I opened the 7.x-1.x branch of TAC with no knowledge of Drupal 7. 80% of TAC's upgrade from D6 was straightforward, but then I crashed headlong into the Field API and D7's entity form handling. I started asking a lot of questions, and catch was incredibly patient and helpful. I connected with someone in IRC who had a similar issue with entity forms, and we came to the conclusion that we needed a hook_field_widget_form_alter(), which did not yet exist in the API. We posted an issue for that, and before I'd finished my lunch, sun had written a patch for it.

Around then two things happened. First, the issue summary functionality was deployed on Drupal.org, and I saw a way that I could actually do something useful in the core queue in exchange for all the help I was getting. My hope was that issue summaries would widen the "review bottleneck" by saving reviewers and core committers time. I started writing an issue summary every day for major and critical core issues. Every summary I wrote also taught me something about Drupal.

A few days later, chx asked in IRC for someone to reroll a patch with a couple of minor fixes. I thought, hey, I can do that, and it ended up being my first core commit credit. For chx, who has written more of core than pretty much anyone, it would have been a triviality, but for me, it was the realization that I was actually capable of contributing, at least in a small way. That opened a door for me.

In the process of writing my once-a-day issue summaries, I came across some issues in subject areas I already understood well, so I worked on the patches as well as the summaries. Then I learned how to write automated tests for TAC, and consequently I was able to start contributing automated tests for core as well. The more issues I worked on, the more I understood, and the more I could do. Kind of an avalanche set off by a pebble, by the fact that people like catch and sun and chx took the time to be supportive and encouraging. So that's why I have my Drupal.org profile tagged with "full frontal nicety" (cr. webchick). Be nice. Go out of your way to be helpful and kind, because it can make all the difference to a budding contributor.

Can you explain some of the benefits of getting involved with the community and what you get out of it?

The best part is having co-ownership in the software that I use every day in my job. Being able to help resolve problems I encounter is very empowering, as is knowing where I can turn when I get stumped by something. It's also wonderful to collaborate with talented, engaging people from all over the world.

Now, if I were talking to my boss (hi Justin!), I'd emphasize that being actively involved in the project is good business strategy:

• Filing and participating in issues helps resolve real, production problems for our sites in maintainable ways.
• Contributing code back to the community means that there are thousands of other sites to help debug and test that code.
• Participating in discussions about Drupal core and contributed projects helps us make informed decisions.

What motivates you to help out others to get involved?

Two things:

1. For years, I was active in contributed module queues, but terrified of core. It took meeting a couple of friendly Acquianauts at DrupalCon Chicago to show me that core developers were actually completely approachable human beings. ;) So I'd like to extend that same realization to everyone else who might be in the same place I was.
2. Drupal 7's fantastic success also means that there are a lot more people using Drupal and filing issues. There's also a chronic shortage of experienced patch reviewers, which means issues that could well be fixed by an existing patch get stuck and languish. We as a community need to invest in connecting new contributors with the work they can do now.

What's your advice to new would-be contributors?

1. Join Drupal IRC channels. Lurk in #drupal-contribute.
2. Check out core office hours or the Novice queue.
3. Try your hand at contributing an issue summary. If you take the time to carefully read and understand an issue, you'll likely learn a lot about a particular topic, and also get a feel for how the community resolves issues and makes decisions.
4. Code is not the only way to contribute--not even for core. (Just today, a self-proclaimed "not a PHP nerd" unblocked a 4+ year old core issue by doing manual testing.)
5. When someone gives you feedback, embrace it! If code is your thing, learn to love the patch reviews you get. Even if all someone says is that a code comment is unclear, they're helping your patch move forward.
6. Pay attention to the feedback that experienced contributors give others, as well. You can learn a lot by watching what reviewers look for.
7. Above all, be patient and don't get discouraged! Sometimes it can take a long time and a lot of iterations for issues to be resolved. And, if you are unsure about anything, ask the nice folks in IRC.

What do you do with Drupal these days?

Well, it looks like I'm finally going to get to upgrade my department's sites to D7, which is a huge relief. I'm looking forward to experimenting with responsive frontend design and all the cool stuff I missed out on during a decade of supporting pixel-perfect IE6. (We finally decided to drop support this year.)

How did you get started in Drupal? What were your stumbling blocks, and what were the moments that things started to click?

The full version of that story requires a couple drinks, or possibly a therapist. However, I'll say that cowboy-coding a CMS with 2-3 others back in 2003 taught me the comparative value of open source projects, and that I picked Drupal for a client in 2006 primarily because the Drupal community seemed to be active and thriving.

The thing that stumped me the most in those first few months with Drupal 4.7 was probably access control; I spent weeks of testing and hacking trying to implement the permission scheme I wanted. (I installed TAC very briefly in D4.7... and uninstalled it as fast as I possibly could. I'm not sure if it's irony or fate that led to me maintaining it.) A few turning points for me were learning firsthand the bad things that could happen if I hacked core; the release of the Zen theme, which brightened my relationship with Drupal's frontend considerably; and my discovery of hook_nodeapi() and hook_form_alter(). Oh, and when I got over the idea that "I was a developer and knew how to write SQL" and realized that Views was pretty powerful. ;)

What's your favorite restaurant in Madison?

That might be the toughest question here, because we have a lot of amazing restaurants! In this context, I think the honor must go to Bradbury's, where I've written a whole lot of code, issue summaries, and so on; not to mention papers on topics ranging from the ecological history of Cherokee Marsh to the sociolinguistics of the distinction between Hindi and Urdu. (This is what happens when you go to college for over a decade.) Bradbury's has the best coffee in town, plus a rotating, seasonal menu of sweet and savory crêpes featuring local produce.

What would Linnaeus do?

Well, I'd love it if he could help me out with the Cyperaceae. If you think Drupal can be confusing, try identifying sedges sometime.

Anything else to add? :)

t5'''''''''''''''/
(This last contribution is from my cat Auri, who wisely considers my laptop to be her primary competitor for my attention.)

Know of anyone else doing awesome things in the community? Nominate them for Community Spotlight!

New hands-on trainings are now open for registration when you register for DrupalCon Denver 2012. A full listing has been added online where you can read more about the trainings going on Monday, March 19, 2012 before the conference kicks off. Training is offered at a much reduced rate compared to standard full day training offerings and it's a great opportunity to save on travel costs if you are attending DrupalCon already. All trainings will be held in the Convention Center, the venue for the conference March 20 - 22, 2012.

What Trainings Are Available?

• Deploying Drupal at Scale on Microsoft Platform
• Drupal 7 Module Development
• Site Building and More - A Mentored Training from Build a Module.com
• From PSD to Drupal Theme: A step-by-step approach to creating your first Drupal theme
• Rules Mastery
• Responsive First: Design and build a site for all devices
• Absolute Beginners Guide to Drupal
• Making the Switch to Drupal: The Developer's View
• Security: Process, Code & Hands-on Training
• Code-driven Development: Use Features Effectively
• Awesome UX Deliverables and Process

This array of professional trainings offers something to all levels of experience. You can register for trainings at the same time you register for the conference, or if you have already registered, it's easy to get the discounted package rate, too.

DrupalCon is a great way to get so much of the community in the same place at the same time; if you haven't already, register today and sign up for a training.

In the spirit of giving, a special promotion is now available to anyone who registers or has already registered: purchase your tickets by Dec. 31, 2011* and receive a special edition DrupalCon T-shirt (*23:59:59 UTC/GMT -7).

Drupal 7.10, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. Several major bugs, including one causing errors with the 5.x branch of Drush, have been fixed this release. See the Drupal 7.10 release notes for a full listing.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

DrupalCon Denver is just 5 months away. While the organizing team is committed to keeping the event affordable - with a low ticket price of $350 and affordable hotel options - there are even lower cost options for some members of the Drupal community.

DrupalCon Denver Scholarships

The deadline to apply for scholarships for DrupalCon in Denver is tomorrow -- anyone who has not yet applied can do so online until November 18, 2011 midnight Mountain Time. The DrupalCon Denver scholarship program allows community members who would otherwise not be able to attend DrupalCon to benefit from the DrupalCon experience as the Drupal Community benefits from each scholar's attendance. Read about the eligibility requirements and get the link to the online form by visiting DrupalCon Denver's Scholarship webpage.

Sprints at DrupalCon: More glorious than ever

DrupalCon Denver will better highlight and accommodate contribution and code sprints throughout the conference. To support sprints, we're offering a limited number of free attendance tickets. Sprint leads can now register with their proposed focus, and should have a group of at least 3 sprinters together at the time of application. Applicants should be ready to describe in detail the goal (what you plan to improve) and desired outcome (what will be accomplished during the sprint). Sprints can take place at anytime during the conference; they need not happen only on the Friday following the scheduled sessions. Preference is given to sprints that plan for a full day's amount of work, even if it's spread out over several days. Preference is also given to sprints that align with the conference theme or the following categories:

• Documentation
• Drupal.org improvements
• Drupal Core (Drupal 8 Initiatives or Drupal 7 bug fixes)
• Top contrib projects or community improvements

Applications have already started to roll in. You can apply online as a Sprint Lead. Sprint Lead selections will be announced in January. Check the official DrupalCon Denver website for the latest information.

We are excited that DrupalCon Denver is still very affordable and also able to include even more programs to keep it affordable for the people in our diverse community who need and deserve a little more help.

Correction: Previous posting of this said the deadline is November 17th, which is incorrect. The deadline is November 18th.

The Drupal Security Team was originally created in 2005. Though we handled security issues before that, we didn't have a team with proper infrastructure until then. At that time, Károly Négyesi (chx) was the team leader. In July 2006 chx changed his role in the team and I promoted Heine Deelstra to be the security team lead. Heine recently stepped down as the security team lead, and I'm pleased to announce that Greg Knaddison (or greggles on drupal.org) will be filling this role.

Greg has been a consistent member of the security team and both Heine Deelstra, the security team members, and myself unanimously agreed that Greg is the logical person to head the Drupal Security Team.

For those who don't know Greg, Greg helped write our free handbooks on security and wrote a book about Drupal Security. He has also talked about security and Drupal at many DrupalCons. Greg believes in my idea to automate where possible and empower project maintainers. In the coming weeks he will write blog posts to detail some changes made in the last year toward that vision and some tasks that still remain.

As the Drupal Security Team lead, Greg will be the point person for the team. He'll be responsible for coordinating the security team's activities and for making decisions when consensus doesn't arise.

Greg and I agreed on a target of 2 years for him to be in this role. If appropriate, he may continue in this role longer or be replaced before then, but this target helps to set an expectation about the time period. Setting this expectation should help Greg maintain enthusiasm for this role and increase the likelihood that our community will have continuity when that time is up. Greg works at Acquia and will be given 20% of his time to dedicate to the security team (in addition to using his own spare time).

Please join me in thanking Heine for all the great work he did, and in welcoming Greg.

git.drupal.org, drupal.org and our sub-sites have a scheduled maintenance window on Tuesday November 15th from 5PM PST to 7PM PST (UTC-8). Note that this is not a downtime window for drupal.org, but a period of possible instability. git.drupal.org and git.drupalcode.org will have an actual downtime during this window. Watch drupal_infra on Twitter for real-time status updates.

This maintenance window is to re-rack and re-VLAN our servers. Thank you for your patience.

Klaus Purer is a member of the Drupal community who has been recently been extremely active with project applications. How active? In the last 30 days he has commented on almost twice as many projects as the next most prolific commenter. Even though he just got involved in the last month, he's tied for most reviews of the most projects in the last 6 months!

How did you get involved with Drupal?

I started to work with Drupal during my involvement with the students union at the Vienna University of Technology (Fachschaft Informatik) back in 2006. I was just a user at that time, posting articles and keeping the web site up to date. In 2008 I was looking for some work besides my computer science studies and ran into a job advertisement by jpetso. I found it very appealing because it mentioned “actively taking part in an open source project” and since I at least knew Drupal a little it was a great match. So I started at Pro.Karriere (now known as epiqo) as part time Drupal developer, I think I did my first patch for Comment CCK (porting it to Drupal 6). Another boost for my involvement was the Google Summer of Code program in 2009, where I did a project for the Rules module. Fago was a great mentor (and still is today).

What do you do with Drupal these days?

I finished my master thesis this year, which talks about the Web Service Client module. I’m working on eRecruiter, a Drupal 7 distribution for online job boards. I help fago to maintain Rules and sometimes Entity API, I really like to work with RESTWS and I sometimes have to do hackish, pure Drupal-work-around modules like Role Export. I am a Google Summer of Code mentor and I am proud what my student sepgil accomplished this year (Rules Link). I have some Drupal core patches here and there waiting for your review. You can find me on meetups of the Drupal Austria local user group.

What got you started in the project application review process?

I saw people whining online about the project applications issue queue and the huge backlog. I was curious how hard it could be to do a review, and I saw that it actually is pretty easy. Then I wondered how many reviews one person could do in 24 hours. I took some time in the weekend and slayed down around 130 issues. I got motivated by the progress and continued my work, now with the challenge to reach zero "needs review" issues. Haven't succeeded yet, but will go for it when I have time. I think it is crucial for the Drupal community to get more developers on board, so that not only the Drupal user base grows but also the developer base.

What are some of your favorite moments from that process?

I like it how fast projects can evolve from a crappy code base to a clean and polished version. It is great to see how people care about their work, want to learn and want to get it right. They are excited when they get approved and spread their motivation to others, even to myself.Another aspect is that I myself learn a lot being a reviewer. The most valuable things are the security reviews by greggles, that point out weaknesses in the code that could be exploited by an attacker. It really hurts when greggles shoots down an issue for security reasons that you RTBC’ed before, but I appreciate it as it grows my awareness about security issues and my knowledge how to identify them.

Are there any cool projects you’ve learned about through that process?

Yes, definitely. Of course people don’t do blockbuster modules like Views or Rules as their first Drupal module, but there are nice ideas like Fixed field, Guest, User Email Domain and many others that I have forgotten right now.

What changes do you hope will come in the project review process?

I would like to get more reviewers involved. We can automate the reviews a bit (I created a bash script to do some common checks, see PAReview.sh), but we need human approval anyway later in the process. There are plans to deploy some automation on drupal.org directly, but that long term effort does not solve the problem of lacking reviewers now. You can do a decent project review in 10-15 minutes, so if more people would just do one per day or one per week we would not have any problems.

It looks like you’ve been to several Drupalcons. What is your favorite part of these events?

The atmosphere of friendly human interaction. It amazes me how nice and welcoming all people are and how low the barriers of entry are. I like it that there are almost no hierarchies between the people and that you can talk to just anyone.

Tell us a little about your background or things that interest you outside Drupal?

I’m living in Vienna, Austria, and I’m a free and open source software enthusiast. I like to compare programming languages, so I hate PHP (if only Drupal were written in Python!). I’m interested in politics, ethics, philosophy and gender studies. I am a vegetarian and I support attac.

Where to find Klaus:

http://twitter.com/_klausi_
http://klau.si/
http://drupal.org/user/262198

Earlier this year the Drupal Association began a process to elect and build a new board. In July a call for nominations was made and the community responded with over 50 submissions. The nomination committee spent many weeks reviewing the nominations, following up with potential candidates, until finally submitting a slate of nominees, which was confirmed by the board. I'm happy to announce the new Board of Directors:

1. Jeff Walpole (until 2014)
2. Vesa Palmu (until 2014)
3. Tiffany Farriss (until 2014)
4. Cary Gordon (until 2013)
5. Danese Cooper (until 2013)
6. Mike Woster (until 2013)
7. Angela Byron (until 2012)
8. Mitchell Toomy (2012)
9. Unknown - one open seat, to be filled

The Board also approved Dries Buytaert (me) to fill the "founder role" in this year's Board of Directors.

The Board's term will begin on November 1, 2011. The first meeting of the new Board of Directors will be on November 16, 2011. This will be followed by the Drupal Association Board Retreat in Chicago, December 9 - 11, 2011.

Selection process

A nomination committee consisting of over eight community members considered over 100 candidates before settling on the great groups of individuals that we're proud to welcome to the Drupal Association. We believe this Board brings a lot of expertise to the Drupal Association, as well as more diversity in terms of industry representation, agency size, skill sets, gender, and geographic location. As the Association has grown so has the extent of financial and community responsibility and this board represents a shift to better address those needs in order to build a strong Association to support our community.

At-large / Community board seats

To ensure solid community representation we will also begin the process of electing two "At-large Board Members". At large board members are nominated and selected by the community at-large with no prerequisites for nomination. We are currently looking at the best method to get community involvement and will begin the process very soon.

Advisory Board

The Board of Directors is a guiding force for the Association and helps to set strategic direction. However, we recognize that the board members do not have all of the answers. To advise the board we have sought out talented individuals with a wide breadth of experience and expertise to serve as the Association's advisers. Our advisory board is designed to grow and expand with the needs of the organization and the community. One of the many ways the Association is working to stay strongly connected to the community is by seeking out community leaders, influencers, and talented individuals that can lend insight into the direction of the Drupal to be advisers to the Association.

The Association's advisers currently include:

1. Kristof Van Tomme
2. David Strauss
3. Larry Garfield
4. Kieran Lal
5. George DeMet
6. Bevan Rudge
7. Greg Knaddison
8. Laura Scott
9. Khalid Baheyeldin
10. Fernando Paredes García
11. Moshe Weitzman
12. Bill Fitzgerald

We're growing

One year ago the Drupal Association hired its first employees to strengthen our conference and our volunteer community. In that year Drupal.org surpassed a million nodes and hosts over 12,000 developer accounts. DrupalCon welcomed nearly 5,000 attendees and over 1,000 people have been trained at the past four conferences. Membership in the Association has also doubled in the past year and we are still growing. We are on target to have 2,000 individual members and over 750 organization members by the end of this year. This is an exciting time to be involved with the Drupal project and the Drupal Association, and I believe the new Board of Directors will help the Drupal Association get to the next level. So please join me in welcoming all the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association.

Here are bios of each Board Member and a short introduction as to why each member was selected:

Angela Byron

The Drupal Association needs to make sure it doesn't lose connection with the developer community that made Drupal into what it is today. Angie with her self-made success and long time contributor is someone who personalizes the values of our community. Angie also provides continuity in the Drupal Association board.

Danese Cooper

Danese has a very strong track record in open source governance: the experience she gained beating the drums of Open Source at Sun, Intel, Wikimedia foundation and now the Gates Foundation makes her a strong Board Member.

Tiffany Farriss

Having served not only on the Drupal Association board but on the governance committee, Tiffany provides important continuity in the Drupal Association board. She brings experience in a mid-sized Drupal business active in the Drupal community, events (DrupalCon production), and financial skills, having served as the Drupal Association treasurer.

Cary Gordon

Cary played an important role in the professionalization process of DrupalCon and was member of the governance committee. Cary is the owner of a small Drupal business and as such is representing smaller Drupal shops. As a member of the previous Drupal Association board, Cary is also important for continuity.

Vesa Palmu

As a serial entrepreneur and owner of Mearra, Vesa represents the European Drupal business ecosystem. His company, a medium sized Drupal shop in Finland that is expanding outside of it's borders, is similar to many Drupal shops in the European market. Vesa has been one of the organizers in the Finnish Drupal community and he's the informal national representative for Finland on the Drupal Association's European community dinners. Next to his professional experience Vesa brings affinity with the world of NGO's through his involvement in several smaller not for profits and the Finnish Red Cross.

Mitchell Toomey

We chose Mitchell because as a senior employee of the UNDP he brings insights in Drupal's role at big Drupal customers and at international governmental organizations more specifically. Mitchell leads an international team using the Teamworks Drupal-based intranet application and active in six regional hubs throughout the developing world with a current focus on Africa. He has an MBA in Organizational Behavior and Information Technology.

Jeff Walpole

Jeff was selected because on top of his business experience, he brings key insights on the use of Drupal in government and the Drupal distributions/products ecosystem. As the CEO and co-founder of Phase2 Technology, Jeff is a business leader in the Drupal community. He knows what it takes to build a multi-million dollar services company, and to invest in and market Drupal products.

Mike Woster

Drawing from his experience as the COO of the Linux Foundation and holder of an MBA, Mike has strong experience in running a tech non-profit. His knowledge of the tech non-profit world should give the Drupal Association insight into what financial and organizational models the Drupal Association might consider and how those would impact the community. His MBA from Kellogg School at Northwestern University has been put to immediate use in his role at the Linux Foundation interacting with lawyers, reading financial reports, and managing a distributed staff. His undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University and industry experience as a developer ensures he understands the “tech” side of a tech non-profit.

Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for Drupal. Dries also co-founded the Drupal Association and served as president of the Drupal Association since its start. He is also co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed Drupal company with 160 employees. Dries is also a co-founder of Mollom, a small web start-up that helps you stop website spam. Dries holds a PhD in computer science and engineering. In 2008, Buytaert was elected Young Entrepreneurs of Tech by BusinessWeek as well as MIT TR 35 Young Innovator. Dries brings community experience, business experience and continuity to the Drupal Association. As native of Belgium that moved to the US less than two years ago, and that travels extensively, Dries is able to represent the international ecosystem.

Drupal 7.9, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. Several critical bugs with the OpenID have been addressed in this release, among other critical and major bugs, and a few new API features. See the Drupal 7.9 release notes for a full listing.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Session proposals are still being accepted for the next DrupalCon, being held at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, March 19 -23, 2012. The conference theme is "Collaborative Publishing for Every Device" and the deadline to submit sessions is October 26, 2011 23:59:59 UTC/GMT -7.

DrupalCon Denver will be focusing on 8 significant areas of expertise and of particular interest to Drupal users and developers alike. Preference will be given to session ideas that examine the following tracks and how they relate to the conference theme:

• Site Building
• Coding and Development
• Design and User Experience
• Drupal Community
• Business Strategy
• Mobile
• Commerce
• Nonprofit, Government and Education

These session tracks descriptions are available online, so make sure to visit the official DrupalCon Denver website to learn more.

Session ideas are posted online as they are submitted - see the list of sessions proposed so far. The final selections picked from all session submissions will be announced on November 16, 2011 and the final DrupalCon Denver schedule will be live on December 7, 2011. Any and all proposals are welcome -- help keep DrupalCon 100% powered by You!

Follow @drupalcon on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

It is with great excitement that I can announce "subscribe" comments on Drupal.org issues are now dead! Long live issue following! Issue e-mail notifications are also improved.

Almost exactly 6 years after #34496: [meta] Add Flag module to allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe without posting a comment was originally posted, this feature is finally done and deployed on Drupal.org. If you notice any problems, please go to #1306554: QA for issue following on Drupal.org and comment there.

Summary of changes

In the past, you had to comment on an issue in order to keep track of it, commonly done by posting "subscribe" (or variations thereof). Popular issues gained plenty of such comments, making it hard for contributors to distill the important and useful information in an issue.

You are now able to "follow" issues by clicking a button, without commenting on them. You can also "unfollow" issues, even ones you had to comment on but you are not really interested in. Lastly, you can now configure for which projects and issues you want to get e-mail notifications.

Sponsors

First, I'd like to thank the sponsors that made this possible:

The 88 members of the community that contributed to the 2 chip-ins to raise a total of $2777.27 towards the original goal of $7,000.

This sponsorship allowed 3281d Consulting to focus on this project and get it deployed ASAP.

Changes to how we work in the issue queues

There are two big inter-related changes as part of this effort: how we interact with issues on Drupal.org, and changes to the issue e-mail notification functionality.

Working with issues on Drupal.org

The most obvious change is that when you're viewing an issue on Drupal.org, you will now see a large green "Follow" button in the upper right corner:

Clicking the "Follow" button will use AJAX to flag the issue as one you are following. This will trigger two things: 1) the issue appears in the "Your Posts" and "Your Issues" lists (both on your dashboard and the separate tabs on your profile), and 2), the "Follow" button will be replaced with "Following", to indicate you're now following the issue.

If you hover over or put the keyboard focus on this "Following" link, it will turn into an "Unfollow" button:

You can even unfollow issues if you wrote them or commented on them. Whenever you click the "Unfollow" button the issue will disappear from your tracker and you will stop getting e-mail notifications about it (if you get e-mail notifications at all).

Issue e-mail notifications

You can optionally configure Drupal.org to send you an e-mail notification about updates to issues you care about. In the past, this functionality has been somewhat hidden, so a lot of users do not make use of this feature. Now, there is a centralized page to manage all of your issue e-mail notification settings, on the new "Notifications" tab on your account profile page:

This page lets you opt-in to e-mail notifications for issues on Drupal.org. By default, you get no e-mail at all. You can define both a site-wide default and per-project overrides. A very common configuration would be to just set the Default notification to "Issues you follow":

If you maintain some projects on Drupal.org or are otherwise particularly interested in their issue queues, you can also specify per-project overrides of the site-wide default. So for example, another common configuration might be to get notifications for all issues you follow, but to also get notifications about "All issues" in a few specific projects you most care about:

In the past, there was no way to define a site-wide setting, so users often had to configure e-mail notifications across a large number of projects. If you used to be subscribed to 50 or more projects with the "Own issues" setting, that was converted as part of the deployment into a single site-wide default.

The final change to the e-mail notification functionality is that you can now customize the contents of the e-mails themselves. Previously, you always got the entire issue history included in each notification. If you expand the "Configure e-mail contents" fieldset, you'll see the ability to only get the new content in each notification and some checkboxes to control what appears in the subject line of the messages:

There are more ideas to further improve the issue e-mail notification experience, so be sure to read the "Future work" section below.

Thanks

While the financial sponsorship was critical to allowing me to spend the time I needed to drive this home, tons of other people contributed to help make this a reality.

• Daniel F. Kudwien (sun) and Chad Phillips (hunmonk) wrote and reviewed many patches related to this effort.
• Leisa Reichelt (leisareichelt) started the Prairie Initiative which has been instrumental in raising awareness about the need to fix the collaboration tools on Drupal.org. She also provided lots of extremely helpful user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) feedback.
• Roy Scholten (yoroy) and Bojhan Somers (Bojhan) provided extensive usability, user interface and user experience reviews and suggestions.
• Everett Zufelt (Everett Zufelt) provided accessibility reviews and feedback.
• Angela Byron (webchick) helped herding cats, reviewing things, testing, giving feedback, and generally was awesome (as always).
• Narayan Newton (nnewton), Gerhard Killesreiter (killes) and Neil Drumm (drumm) did performance reviews, got the staging site up, and provided general Infrastructure Team goodness.
• Nathan Haug (quicksketch) answered a lot of questions about the internals of the Flag module for the data migration, and helped trying to get the new follow UI working smoothly.
• Jerad Bitner (sirkitree) and Moshe Weitzman (moshe weitzman) wrote the initial patches for a couple of the key issues.
• dereine, amateescu, eliza411, ksenzee, Caligan, xjm, Crell, jhodgdon, pillarsdotnet, timplunkett, naught101, kathyh__, wizonesolutions, techninja, hefox, jwalling, joshuabud, otseld, and torthu helped test the upgrade-while-live data migration code.
• Lisa Rex (lisarex) helped edit this post.
• Everyone else who contributed reviews, testing or implementation suggestions for all the issues related to getting this done.

Future work

As exciting as all of this is, of course there's always more work to do. Generally, we've been using the flag integration issue tag to keep track of things related to this effort. See also the drupal.org notifications tag. You can also check out the Expand "follow" functionality on Drupal.org community initiative page.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to return to other commitments, so I can't just continue to pour unlimited time into getting all of these issues done, UX reviews, code reviews, etc. So, if anyone wants to step up and claim any of these issues to drive them to completion, that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
-Derek Wright (dww)

p.s. Additional history is available at The history of how we killed "subscribe" comments on Drupal.org for the interested reader...

Drupal.org is our home. It's where we solve tough problems, it's where we innovate on creative solutions, and it's where we meet and interact with others in our community. It only makes sense then that our community should be able to actively participate in making improvements happen on Drupal.org, but the process to do so has traditionally been seen as a bit confusing and opaque.

This post attempts to outline the process of making changes to Drupal.org, and highlight some recent successes we've had putting this process into practice. This information is compiled from the Make Drupal.org awesome guide!

Step 1: Think it up

Have a great new idea for improving Drupal.org? Great! Search first, to see if someone else has already had your amazing idea and maybe started work on it. If not, begin by creating an issue in the webmasters issue queue to discuss, unless you happen to know the appropriate issue queue for it.

Prefer to collaborate on some ongoing efforts that other passionate people are working on? Check out the Drupal.org improvements community initiatives page, and its various sub-pages, to join up with others on their big ideas. :)

Step 2: Talk it out

(Note that if you're participating in an existing issue that the Drupal.org maintainers have already signed off on, you can skip this step!)

At this stage, what you want to do is gather feedback from the rest of the community about your idea. Since Drupal.org is a shared resource, it's important that there be buy-in for any given change from multiple people, particularly given the performance challenges of Drupal.org (1,000 people logged in at any given time hitting refresh repeatedly on "My issues"... egad!).

Start by asking for some initial, informal feedback from folks in IRC, Twitter, or a local Drupal user meetup. If that goes well, consider cross-posting your issue to Planet Drupal or potentially interested groups on http://groups.drupal.org to get wider exposure for your idea and broader discussion (but please don't be obnoxious about it :P).

If it looks like the community thinks your idea is a good idea, the final step is to run it past the appropriate members of the Drupal.org infrastructure team.

The Drupal.org infrastructure team "org chart" (click for big version)

Run the idea past the person who's "in charge" of that particular area. For example, if your idea was to make improvements to the themes listing on Drupal.org, you'd want to talk with one of the folks in the "Issue tracker and downloads" section (dww or mikey_p) about that. If it's a larger-scale change with major new functionality, the Drupal.org infrastructure manager (killes) should also be pinged.

Got sign-off from the infrastructure maintainer(s)? Perfect! Now you're ready to...

Step 3: Code it up

There are two ways to develop improvements against Drupal.org:

Get a drupal.org development sandbox (preferred)

Drupal.org sandboxes are hosted on a domain like http://issue-summaries-drupal.redesign.devdrupal.org/ and contain a sanitized/trimmed copy of a real Drupal.org database. These work really well for allowing others to test your changes in a "real" environment.

Develop locally with Drupal.org testing profile

Ideal for smaller tweaks, or self-contained features that doesn't require "real" Drupal.org data. The Drupal.org testing installation profile will hook you up with an installation of Drupal with all of the various modules that Drupal.org uses, plus some basic configuration. It's definitely not perfect, but good enough for a lot of smaller things.

Now. Remember all of those people who supported your idea back in step 2? Tell 'em to turn out and help with development, UI feedback, and reviewing. :D

It's really helpful to have a single "meta" issue tracking any sub-tasks, as well as an up-to-date issue summary at the top of that issue, outlining the remaining tasks before your initiative is ready to be deployed. This helps new people coming in to know where to be the most effective.

Before moving onto the next step, it's a good idea to make sure that any dependent patches have been committed upstream (if at all possible), and a clear list of deployment tasks (e.g. new modules to be added, what settings to change, etc.) are added to the issue summary. This will make deployment as easy as possible.

Step 4: Get 'er done

Once the change gets to "reviewed & tested by the community," it's time to prepare for deployment:

1. Tag your issue as needs drupal.org deployment.
2. Post an issue to the infrastructure issue queue which points to the issue where the change has been implemented, point to the deployment steps, the dev site, and request a final review of the changes.

If it's a big enough change, its deployment might need to be scheduled if it will incur any drupal.org downtime. You should be a good Drupal citizen and make yourself available to the infrastructure team if they have any questions during deployment in #drupal-infrastructure on IRC.

Assuming your change passes a final review from the infrastructure team on things like performance and maintenance considerations, your brilliant idea should now be up singing and dancing in front of everyone on Drupal.org. WOOHOO!!

Sounds good, but does it actually work?

In a word, absolutely! Here is a list of recent improvements that have been pushed out through this process:

Better system for tracking API changes

During Drupal 7's release cycle (and before), making an API change to Drupal core involved editing this gigantic page of horror and tears. It was cumbersome, and therefore it was very difficult to get developers to do this, and there are probably still API changes today, ten months after Drupal 7's release, which are not tracked here. :(

Jennifer "jhodgdon" Hodgdon spear-headed the initiative to turn these API changes into nodes, with a view that can filter by version, who it affects, and so on. It can also track whether or not Coder Upgrade rules were written, whether or not relevant documentation was updated, etc. for each change. YAY!

Issue summaries

A huge barrier to entry to core development and other places where large sections of the community have a lot of things to say about things is long, sprawling, complicated discussions. Take a typical critical bug report in Drupal 7 like #228818: IE: Stylesheets ignored after 31 link/style tags and watch it grow from 20 to 50 to 100 to 400 comments over time. Coming in fresh to these types of issues is almost impossible; it can require hours' worth of reading, and entire code sprints intended to focus on fixing critical issues have been taken up doing just that. :(

This issue resulted in making issue bodies themselves editable, so that in these types of complex issues all a new person (or a busy core maintainer) has to do is read the first post and then be caught up with major happenings. All issues on Drupal.org now have an "Edit" tab, which refers to an issue summary template to highlight what's going on in this issue, what the proposed solution is, and what remains to be done about it. This has collectively shaved hundreds of hours off of collaboration on tricky issues already, and has even started an "Issue summary initiative" led by xjm to specifically seek out these complex issues and write up summaries for them. A great way to dive in for people new to core development!

Images for all on Drupal.org

The ability to post inline images on Drupal.org has been traditionally locked down to only privileged users (the "documentation team" role or higher) in order to prevent possible Cross-site request forgery attacks, and also to prevent mixed content errors when Drupal.org moves to HTTPS. While great from a security POV, this is absolutely terrible from a collaboration POV. :\ Designers, usability folks, bug reporters, casual documentation editors, and others are prevented from participating unless they ask for and receive elevated permissions on the site.

sun and chx worked together on a new general-use module called Local image input filter to meet Drupal.org's needs. It restricts <img> tags to the local site only, and also verifies that what's being linked to is actually an image. No chance of linking to something nefarious on evilh4x0r.com, and no chance of mixed content errors either since all URLs are re-written as relative. NICE! So not only was a useful problem solved for Drupal.org, but others who need the same capability can take advantage of it as well.

The key thing about these patches? They were all developed by people not in the infrastructure team org chart! Just regular ol' Drupal contributors like you and me. :)

So, let's make Drupal.org awesome!

Come along and join us!

Hello from Jennifer and Ariane, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team co-leads! It’s time for a quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation Team—we've been working on some major restructuring of documentation and the Docs Team since our last update (June 28, 2011), and we'd like to get you up to date on our plans, and other events and news.

Docs restructuring

The big news for this quarter is that we are in the midst of some restructuring of the online Drupal documentation, as well as of the Documentation Team itself. Nothing has been completely settled yet, but here is an outline of our plans, reasoning, and links to more information and where you can get involved in the discussion.

Community documentation

The main issue we need to resolve is that the current online documentation on Drupal.org is way too overwhelming for one coordinator to manage. Having one coordinator is a single point of failure, and has led to several past Docs Team leaders getting burned out and leaving the post.

The current documentation has many features of a wiki: anyone can edit most of the pages, and anyone can add new pages... Yet we have found that potential documentation contributors are timid about actually editing and adding pages. So what we would like to do is turn responsibility over to the community as a whole, and make it abundantly clear that everyone can edit and contribute. The plans have been solidified on this issue: #1278256: Develop a plan to make it more clear that the current Documentation on drupal.org is community maintained., and if you'd like to help with the infrastructure changes (site building and module development), we are currently coordinating docs infrastructure work on http://groups.drupal.org/node/174499 . Follow-up changes to the infrastructure are being discussed on #1287784: Follow-ups to improve the community docs.

Curated documentation

Once we have those changes deployed, the next idea is to start a new section of documentation that will be more directly curated and maintained by the official Documentation Team leadership—and therefore, more limited in scope. The idea here is that careful decisions will be made about what are the "essentials" that belong in this documentation (which might be called "official documentation" or "user manual" or "curated documentation" or "essentials" or ...), and a small team will be responsible for maintaining the documentation. This idea has not been completely fleshed out yet; it's being discussed on issue #1291058: Make a curated docs section if you'd like to join the discussion.

Outside documentation

Another idea that's in development is to make it possible to search external documentation—for instance, Drupal tutorials on blogs, and curriculum on Drupal company web sites. Lin Clark is currently exploring ideas for automatic collection of posts involving RDFa/microdata and SPARQL, and there will hopefully be more ideas and discussion about this in the next few months. Watch the Documentation Team on groups.drupal.org for updates!

API reference

We don't expect anything to change in the process, maintenance, or location of the API reference site on api.drupal.org. That process is actually working fine, and Jennifer is pleased to report that there have been many new contributors stepping up to submit patches lately. (Note: sprint coming up—see below!)

July - September events

Here are some events that the Documentation Team participated in during the third quarter of 2011:

• At the end of August, many from the Docs Team were at DrupalCon London. We had BoFs ("Birds of a Feather" informal discussions) about DITA (a standard for documentation), the proposed new Help system for Drupal 8, and Lin Clark's ideas about using RDFa or microdata to build an index to documentation from Drupal Planet (see above).
• At DrupalCon, there was also a Core Conversation session about DITA and the new help system.



• And of course we also had a very successful Documentation Sprint on the last day of the conference, with three tables of participants helping each other become knowledgeable documentation contributors. Thanks to all who participated!
• We are holding weekly "Documentation Office Hours"—one-hour IRC meetings on Tuesday afternoon (North American time), open to anyone for questions and discussions about contributing to documentation. It seems like it's been very helpful to have a definite time when people can find us on IRC, and we plan to continue with this schedule for the foreseeable future.

Upcoming API docs sprint

The API documentation on api.drupal.org has been improving slowly but surely over the past couple of years (I think/hope). But there are still quite a few areas where the documentation does not conform to the API documentation standards. Unfortunately, patches that do wholesale changes to documentation headers are disruptive to the ongoing improvements of the Drupal code, since they often require that many patches be "re-rolled" so that they will apply to the new code-base. So, we've been told several times that we needed to postpone these types of large-scale updates.

However, in early November, a patch is scheduled to go into Drupal 8 that will move all of the core Drupal files into a "core" directory. This will be a huge disruption, as every patch for Drupal 8 will need to be re-rolled. Because of this, it's a great time do other disruptive work, and we plan to have an API Documentation sprint just after that patch goes in, where we'll do a defined set of wholesale improvements to the in-code docs for Drupal 8. Mark your calendar—I'm hoping that we have lots of participants (including new API docs contributors) so the work for each person will be manageable!

Process, communication, and infrastructure milestones

Aside from the infrastructure and team reorganization mentioned above, there were some smaller initiatives in the Documentation Team this quarter:

• In July, Neil Drumm (drumm), with help from a few others, deployed a new feature to your Drupal.org user profile and Drupal.org company profile, aimed at recognizing documentation contributions: there is now a line in the History section of user profiles and the right sidebar of the new Marketplace company profile that says something like “Over 100 edits”, reflecting how many documentation page revisions you have made since joining Drupal.org. This is a small way of recognizing documentation contributions to the Drupal project.
• At DrupalCon Chicago, Dries suggested that in Drupal 8 development, each change would have to pass through a series of "gates" in order to be accepted, and Documentation was listed as one of his "gates", but it wasn’t defined what the gates really meant. So, a conversation was started with Jennifer, Angela Byron, and other members of the community, and in July, the Documentation gate standards were adopted. The adopted gates are listed on the gates page.
• In July, Angela Byron and Jennifer (along with many others) finalized two changes to the Drupal issue workflow: Issue Summaries and Change Notification nodes. With issue summaries, anyone can now edit the node body of any issue, to use the body as an Issue Summary, and we have a suggested issue summary template to use when filing or updating issues. With change notification nodes: for Drupal Core (and any other project that chooses to use them), after an issue is fixed, if the committed fix involves changes to the user interface or programming interface, a Change Notice node should be created to document the change. Then the Documentation Team, Coder module team, Examples module team, module developers, and theme developers can all visit http://drupal.org/list-changes (simple view) and http://drupal.org/list-change-updates (maintainer view) to find relevant changes that affect them or that need to be acted upon.
• Jennifer mentored Google Summer of Code student Tamás Demeter-Haludka (Yorirou) over the summer, who created the Conditional Text module. We expect to use this for the new Help system and probably the curated docs as well.

Next steps

If you're interested in helping with Drupal documentation:

• Watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team and/or Twitter (@drupaldocs) for updates on what the Documentation Team is up to, and to participate in discussions.
• New contributors: start at http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation to learn all about contributing to documentation.
• You can also check the Current Priorities http://drupal.org/node/1005304 page to keep up to date with current short-term priorities, http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/documentation for longer-term projects, and http://drupal.org/node/1006924 for Drupal.org improvement projects (some of which impact documentation), and filter for criticals in the documentation issue queues (now handily accessible through the Docs Contributors Drupal.org dashboard block!).

That's all for now—we hope that your fall (or spring, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere) goes well, and we'll be in touch!