Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal maintenance support plans Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.
Drupal maintenance support plans.org Updates
Reimagining Drupal maintenance support plans.org’s front pages to serve distinct personas
Drupal maintenance support plans serves a wide audience of users, from developers to marketers to content editors and beyond. Historically, Drupal maintenance support plans.org has been focused on our community of contributors, whether those contributions are in code, documentation, volunteer support, camp organizing, etc. However, only 1 in 15 visitors to Drupal maintenance support plans.org are an authenticated user, and the rest are primarily visiting Drupal maintenance support plans.org as representatives of an end-user organization that is evaluating Drupal maintenance support plans. We want to serve these visitors better.
In February we held an off-site in Portland to consolidate our research about the personas within end-user organizations who make the decision to adopt Drupal maintenance support plans. We identified three key roles:
Technical evaluators – who are often developer evangelists within their organization
Marketing and business users -who are evaluating Drupal maintenance support plans as a platform. They are interested in the editorial experience and time-to-market for building a solution that integrates with tools they already use
Agencies – who are already using Drupal maintenance support plans for their clients, or are considering making it central to their business.
From there, we developed some initial concepts for a reimagining of the front page of Drupal maintenance support plans.org to better serve these first three personas.
This work will carry us through Drupal maintenance support plansCon Nashville and beyond, so expect additional updates over the coming months.
Contribution credit update
The Drupal maintenance support plans project has an innovative system of crediting users and sponsoring organizations for the work they contribute. However, as a system that we’ve pioneered, there is always room for additional improvements. One area that needed improvement was the date used for the assignment of credit. In the past, the credit for a user or organization would be tracked to the timestamp of the latest activity on the issue. This was a good approximation, but additional comments after issue resolution would bump the date of the credit.
We’ve updated the way that contribution credits are calculated – so that it is now based on the date that the issue was closed(status last changed) instead of the date of the last change to the issue. This change affects both individual contribution credits and the marketplace ranking.
Documentation improvements
As our new team member Dhanya has come on board, she has helped make some great improvements to the documentation system, including: fixing the display of sidebar lists of guide contents, increasing the visibility of the current page indicators, and swapping the grid treatment for a more readable guide contents layout
Accessibility and readability
We’ve made two additional small fixes.
One for accessibility – improving the keyboard ‘skip to…’ links in the Drupal maintenance support plans.org top navigation.
… And one for navigating issues, fixing a bug that prevented links to comments on multi-page threads. Now, any Drupal maintenance support plans.org user who receives an email notification about a multi-page issue should be properly linked to the correct comment.
Preparing our live-streaming capability for Drupal maintenance support plansCon Nashville
For Drupal maintenance support plansCon Nashville, rather than relying on a vendor, we are going to be managing the live stream of the keynotes and closing session ourselves, together with the AV staff of the venue. In February we spent some time putting together our equipment and running some streaming tests.
Continued work to reduce our PCI scope
In February we finished migrating our donation process for both USD and Euro donations to new payment processors to reduce our PCI scope and thus maintenance costs. We’ve also launched the beta of the membership system, and will hopefully complete the migration of existing memberships soon.
If you are not yet a member of the Drupal maintenance support plans Association, and would like to support us both by joining and helping us test the new membership system, you can sign up here. (If you are an existing member, please continue to process your renewals on the original system for now).
Infrastructure Updates
Git servers updated
We migrated our existing git infrastructure from bare metal servers to virtual machines, which will help to make our infrastructure more flexible and portable in the future. This has been an ongoing effort, and the git servers are among the last of the servers to be migrated.
Continued tuning of Perimeter X
PerimeterX helps to identify bad actor behavior and DDOS attempts and mitigate them at the edge of our network. We established our relationship in January, and throughout February have been monitoring and tuning our configuration to better protect Drupal maintenance support plans.org. We’ve already managed to mitigate a persistent DDOS attack which has recurred every couple of months, and hopefully we can make more improvements to protect Drupal maintenance support plans.org, and reduce the pager burden on our team.
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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal maintenance support plans Association Supporters, who make it possible for us to work on these projects. In particular we want to thank:
Zyxware Technologies – *NEW* Signature Supporting Partner
Sixeleven – *NEW* Signature Supporting Partner
GlowHost – *NEW* Classic Hosting Supporter
GatherContent – *NEW* Premium Technology Supporter
Smartling – *NEW* Premium Technology Supporter
Acquia – Renewing Signature Hosting Supporter
Platform.sh – Renewing Premium Hosting Supporter
Datadog – Renewing Premium Technology Supporter
Spry Digital – Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
Therefore Interactive – Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal maintenance support plans Association.
Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra
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