After many months of careful consideration, I've decided to formally step away from Drupal. I'm extremely grateful for what it's taught me and all the friends I've made. Life, however, is calling me in other directions, and I no longer have time to devote to my volunteer work with the community. I feel it's best to make a clean, formal break as opposed to simply taking time off or leaving things open, as it will allow me to focus my attention fully on my new endeavors.

I'm very pleased to announce that Distribution packaging is now fully supported on Drupal.org. I hope this will enable many Drupal distributions that were previously hosted off-site (due to the restrictions and limitations in packaging) to move back home onto Drupal.org, and allow new distributions to develop and flourish.

Taking advantage of the immense Drupal talent in town for BADCamp we decided to host a sprint to redesign the Project* suite for Drupal 7. We had a great turn-out of Drupal rockstars who wanted to help get Drupal.org closer to running D7 and to help with the future of our community's collaboration tools. In person, we had:

• Derek Wright (dww)

If you've been involved with Drupal for any length of time, you have most likely used the features provided by the Project Suite (project, project_issue, project_release, etc.) on drupal.org, which provide community-critical features such as:

• Issue tracking
• Issue e-mail notifications
• Release management
• Release packaging/downloads
• Project usage tracking
• Project searching

In case you haven't heard the news, I just posted Stop subscribing, start following to the front page of Drupal.org. What a happy day! One week shy of 6 years after it was originally posted, #34496: [meta] Add Flag module to allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe without posting a comment is now fixed and deployed live...

Once again, 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.

The front page news story I wrote ended up being a bit long to include some of the other details of the story, so I wanted to post those here in case people an interested.

I can't tell you all how happy I am to announce that "+1 subscribe" comments on Drupal.org are about to enter the dustbin of history where they belong! (Taking up residence right next to CVS). ;)

#34496: [meta] Add Flag module to allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe without posting a comment is now code-complete and ready for public beta testing on staging.drupal.org. If you test this, please head over to QA for #34496 issue following to find out how to provide feedback (either positive or negative). If the beta testing doesn't turn up any major new issues, we're planning to deploy this live on drupal.org (without any downtime, even!) on Tuesday 2011-10-11 around 10am PDT. HURRAY!

The feature is sponsored by...

• The 88 members of the Drupal community that together raised $2777.27 towards an original "chipin" goal of $7000.
• The Drupal Association which provided matching funds.
• NodeOne which provided matching funds.

More details to follow soon. I just wanted to get the word out to the Drupal Planet that the staging site is open for public testing.

YAY! ;)
-Derek

Greetings Drupalers,

In the spirit of the 0th birthday of Drupal 7 and Drupal's 10th birthday I wanted to point out that today, 2011-01-18, is the 5 year anniversary of when I joined the Drupal community:

At DrupalCon SF there's been a bit of a buzz around the new Certified to Rock site that computes metrics about a user's participation on drupal.org. I've been pondering various metrics for users and projects on drupal.org as part of my on-going efforts to improve the tools for our community to figure out WTF is going on.

DrupalCon SF has been an amazing experience so far: reconnecting with people I've known for years, meeting people in person for the first time, hearing interesting things from some of the great presentations, and getting a huge amount done. Quick update on a few items of possible interest:

Those of us at 3281d Consulting are excited about DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 and looking forward to a great conference. Today is your last day to vote for the sessions we've proposed -- we'd love to share some of our experiences and expertise with the rest of the community: