Yesterday, the long awaited drupal.org redesign finally launched. It took multiple sprints (in person and virtual), progress stalling, and the Drupal Association stepping up to fund dedicated (and amazing) people full time to the job to get it complete. It is a huge undertaking. And it is not ready yet. One of the main objectives of the redesign was to make the "drupal.org universe" so to speak, easier to navigate. There are numerous subsites such as http://association.drupal.org, http://groups.drupal.org, http://api.drupal.org, etc, many of which are a mystery for people. By bringing these to the forefront, more visitors will be aware of the vast amount of community space and resources available. How does that work?

If you now go to http://drupal.org, log in and click "Your dashboard", you'll see a set of customizable and reorganizable blocks. That's quite nifty. However, for this post, the navigation on the top of the page is even more interesting. It lets you access your posts, your issues, etc. And also your groups! Hm. But that's on a different site! Well, that is not a problem for the redesign, since you just move to the other site, and the theme and navigation should stay intact, as if you did not go to any other site. The drupal.org centralized login system will log you in, and you can manage your groups just like you'd do if they were on the same site. Well, this will not work just yet, since groups.drupal.org is still to launch the redesign, but that is the concept.

Let's see a working example then. Now go Download & Extend, the new downloads and projects space on drupal.org. This page has various tabs for different ways to extend Drupal. For example, it has a list of some language translations as well as a translations tab. Now, if you click either of those, (surprise), you are taken to a dedicated subsite for translations, http://localize.drupal.org/. You should not notice much change, because this site already runs the same theme and has the unified navigation (which by the way we set up with a shared Drupal module to all the subsites). The only thing you'll miss is the unified cross-site search box, but we are on it to make it work hopefully soon.

What does this mean is that drupal.org is becoming one huge site, and the particularities of the different subsites will matter less. This will allow us to maintain separate functionality on subdomains (a new one planned is http://docs.drupal.org), where we can have purpose-specific tools and maintain our own update schedules. Maintaining more smaller sites is useful for the future of drupal.org, since we can tackle major redesigns and incremental improvements much easier that way.

Of course it is a huge job to make all the subsites not just look like the same on the surface but use the same visual metaphors, similar internal navigation, etc. In this sense, existing sites need detailed attention beyond merely re-launching them under a new theme. Also in the plans are blocks for the dashboard from subsites and other goodies. Hope you'll like the redesign and how we are unifying the user experience to make it easier for you to move around, collaborate and contribute.

Ps. This is yet another step in phasing out of the drupal.org translation projects as the main source of translations. We are moving forward on that path one step at a time.