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very helpful lioness

Ideas for the Drupal Association website, version 2.0?

Sun, 03/15/2009 - 02:02 -- webchick

Now that the Drupal.org redesign is underway, Neil Drumm is currently collecting suggestions for what a revamped Drupal Association website might look like.

The current website was created in a few days back when the Drupal Association was first founded in 2006, and hasn't really received a great deal of attention since then (shoemaker's children, and all that). The current site's content can basically be distilled into three things:

1. Outdated news you already heard somewhere else first.
2. Give us money.
3. Legal mumbo jumbo.

Unfortunately, there is very little emphasis on "awesome stuff the Drupal Association is working on and how you can help." That's something I think we need to change, to both help give the community assurances that their money is being spent wisely, and also to give the larger Drupal community on-ramps to directly help the Drupal Association members achieve their mission of supporting the Drupal project.

Here's a wireframe I came up with at Way Too Late O'Clock that needs a whole bunch of work but is one approach:

Redesign Wireframes

The idea is to both emphasize larger spheres of responsibility that the Drupal Association has, and also highlight both what's happening NOW as well as an archive of what we've achieved in the past.

How about yourself? Do you have thoughts on what you'd like to see in a revamped Drupal Association website? Want to play wireframe ping-pong? I'll collect any responses given here and send them off to Neil on Wednesday, March 19.

Tags: 
drupal
drupal association

Comments

Submitted by Jacques (xmacinfo) (not verified) on

These are very good ideas Angie.

In addition to these changes, for all the "Static" pages of the Association web site, I'd like to see their translations. The Association web site should be the first Drupal web site using the various internationalization features. I would espcially appreciate translation of all donate and memberships pages.

Of courses, blog and other news items would not need to be translated. They could optionally be translated from time to time by volunteers.

Let's make 2009 they year of internationalization. ;-)

- Jacques

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

yeah drupal is pretty cool... buttt i think wordpress has more plugins.. i mean it's a lot of software developers and webmaster tryiing to improve their site and wp at the same time...
This way I'd catch references to tables in the template.php & page.tpl.php files, but not in the css files. All of the themes I have validated are tableless except the following:
ability, artistsC01, blue_bars, bluelake, box_grey, channel_nine, dark, fourseasons, sky, slash

+1 for fundraising drives being featured prominently.

+1 for translation - would be happy to offer time for translation to Italian of the main aspects.

I also think that membership / membership directories and membership benefits should be more clearly marked out. A big song and dance about the badge, etc. After all that is the easiest/most straightforward/tangible "thing" to sell through the website

I don't know how "live" the website should be - for example should the working groups report on the association website or the main drupal.org. Makes sense to list any such groups and provide pointers to where to find more info - but it seems to me group.drupal.org and IRC is where new issues get reported. Perhaps the working group pages could pull in feeds from other places.

The overall purpose of the association website should be to make clear the rules and regulations, who current members and leaders and also how you can become an association member - perhaps also giving paying members some chances provide more info about their company, etc to motivate paying for it, introduce even more tiers, sponsors, etc.

Submitted by personalfinance (not verified) on

This week brought some very welcome news to Drupal fans around the world. The Drupal Association was formed putting a more business front end on the Drupal development community. All of the cool FOSS kids are doing it.

thanks,
personal finance

I really like this so far; it really helps to bring a more active approach to the Association.

Since the issue queues now have RSS, it would be really neat to have an aggregated feed of the last x "fixed" issues related to a.d.o working groups somewhere. That way casual visitors would always see the flurry of activity which is happening, but isn't immediately obvious.

I also think "Become a member" needs to be prominent in the primary menu.

How did you come up with the order of working groups? I would have probably ordered it this way:

Drupal.org redesign
Events
Marketing
Business Development
Fundraising
Legal
Infrastructure

This is based on being in order of the least barrier to entry; I think it will help to get people involved if the top-most links are really easy to dive into. Perhaps some user testing is in the future :)

We have under 1,000 memberships and we have 400,000 users, give or take.

Perhaps we should create a moving target widget. Once we get to the last 25 percent, it can raise the bar by 50 percent.

Submitted by webchick on

I've forwarded your comments off to Neil. We'll see what happens when we decide on budgets, etc. :)

@Jacques: Having translations of all of the website's static content is a great idea! I think we might need lawyers to translate the statutes, but everything else should be fair game.

@Ronald: Thanks a lot for your comments about memberships. I agree that this needs to be promoted much more than it is, along with benefits and "why should I do this?" etc. clearly spelled out.

@Andrew: Yeah, I like your order of working groups much better! I'm not sure in practice how pulling in issues might work (the marketing team doesn't really have an issue queue, for instance), but I really like the idea of showing a constant stream of activity to show people what's going on.

Hi Angela,

This would be the perfect opportunity to implement a brainstorm.ubuntu.com clone based on IdeaTorrent.

Cheers,

Elijah Lynn

PS. Really love your book "Using Drupal", amazing!

Submitted by FF (not verified) on

nice ARTICLE THANKS ALOT
شات

Given that Drupal is an open source project and in many ways is a model of a "transparent" community... I think the web site could do more to make the association more transparent. Specific ideas include:

  • A forum where members can discuss the policies and direction of the organization. Access to this forum would be a concrete benefit of membership. One of the Permanent Members would have to be tasked with monitoring the forum and alerting other Permanent Members with relevant portfolios to attend to the forum when their portfolio's issues are being addressed.
  • There is a need for a FAQ item which translates the association terminology into "North American" and possibly other NPO "dialects." The structure section is horribly confusing for a North American to read. For one thing, in North America "Staff" means "people who are paid to work for the organization." My assumption has been that "Staff" positions in the Drupal Association are volunteer. Assuming I'm correct, that fact needs to be "translated" for North American readers. I'm just picking on one point here. The Board needs to ask someone who isn't a permanent member to read over the "structure" section very closely and ask for feedback about how it can become coherent to a non-European. I'd be happy to volunteer in that effort.
  • Not just at election time, but all the time, there needs to be information about how one becomes a Permanent Member. A date for the next election cycle should always appear on the structure page.
  • You have to download a pdf to find out that "admitted" membership is good for 1 year. Is that a calendar year? Or is it a year from when one joins. Mine expired without me ever getting a renewal notice. (Or maybe I never bought one, but I'm almost sure I did... That information wasn't accessible from the "my account" button, which it should be.
  • Part of being transparent is by being explicit about what is not available to the public or to Admitted Members. For instance, I don't see minutes from the Board posted on the web site. It should be stated somewhere that it is the policy of the Drupal Association to keep board meetings private. Even if that fact is buried in the legal pdfs, it shouldn't only be there.

I realize that a chunk of the post may be "out of scope." But as with the work we do for our clients, building a new web site can often raise issues about how we do our business and not just what features we want on our web site.

It's great that the Drupal Association is working on itself! Thanks Angie for all your efforts.

Submitted by seo (not verified) on

This is not a wrap up post about DrupalCon Barcelona (I'm notoriously bad at those, with all these fresh ideas swirling in my head instead), but rather a post about the Drupal Association.

Model Railroads

Submitted by seo (not verified) on

Googlebot is a frequent visitor(*) of drupal.org, eating over 50GB of traffic in over 11 million requests in March. I didn't know that the postprocessing is also quite fast.

thanks,
search engine optimisation

Submitted by James (not verified) on

You amazed me fellow its seems like drupal is best for us because its indexed faster then any.
it jobs in Dubai

Submitted by Cover Letter Samples (not verified) on

There is a need for a FAQ item which translates the association terminology into "North American" and possibly other NPO "dialects." The structure section is horribly confusing for a North American to read. For one thing, in North America "Staff" means "people who are paid to work for the organization
Cover Letter Samples

How about having a contest where designers submit designs by a certain date and a committee organized by Neil selects a winning design. The design company could reap the benefits of the major feather in their cap of having designed Drupal's new home! Green Spider is working on our concept already - just in case! :D

Submitted by webchick on

We pretty much already have a design, that was created by Mark Boulton for Drupal.org. See the pages under http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration11/. So I don't think we need to re-*design* the site; this is more about how to organize the content of the site since we're giving it a visual refresh anyway. :)

But if you come up with something cool we could ALWAYS use more beautiful contributed themes! And it'd be a great way to get your company's name out there in the larger Drupal community, and may also lead to jobs as well (like what you see? we can do that for your site too. Contact us at ... etc.).

So I hope you'll continue your work either way and share it with the community. :D

Submitted by Jenelia (not verified) on

Why do you think that way?
I would like to see chat option in drupal association website so that users can interact in realtime.

Resume

Submitted by Tim (not verified) on

Thanks.Should the working groups report on the association website or the main drupal.org. Makes sense to list any such groups and provide pointers to where to find more info - but it seems to me group.drupal.org and IRC is where new issues get reported...

this is great information that i know a lot of people are interested in.
thanks for the great offer, this really nice idea
tukang nggame

There isn't so much tasks as you think. A fulfillment service can handle shipping, customer service, product creation. We definitely must outsource these tasks. Does Cafepress handle these?

Here is the TODO list in my opinion:

1) Mark the existing store as the official Drupal store, or create a new one. This page says now: "Drupal does not have any official merchandise; domain names however since the Druplicon logo is licensed under the GNU GPL some people have taken it upon themselves to make their own." This is a mistake because people buy more likely from THE official Drupal store than from any other.

2) Write the FAQ, with questions and answers like:

* Who receives the revenue from the Drupal Store? I payed X $, exactly how much will Drupal earn from my order?
* How will the revenue be spent?
* How can I order?
* How long will it take to get my order?
* How can I track the status of my order?
* Do you ship internationally? How much does it cost?
* I live in country X. How much tax should I pay?
* Do you offer money-back gurantee?
* I got my order, but it is broken/does not fit my size, what to do?
* Do you offer volume discounts?
* Where can I get customer service?

3) Setup a subforum for questions/feedback, and future product ideas for the Store.

4) Integrate and design the shop. Right now if you click on an item, you will be automatically redirected to Cafepress. Is it possible to integrate the shop? dsl The buyer should only be redirected to the fulfillment serive checout, when he/she finished the shopping.

Because if the buyer are on Drupal.org while shopping, then it is more professional.

We need also design the shop.

5) Come up with more products: woman's T-shirts, mugs, Pen Drive, bags, caps.

We could also integrate the books about Drupal node (http://drupal.org/books) into the shop.

(Maybe we could list Drupal trainings as well?)

6) Create a new primary link pointing to the Drupal Shop. It should be better promoted.
We can design a few banners promoting the shop as well.

I can do these tasks:
-Write the FAQ
-Check out the forum of the shop regurarly
-Do administrative tasks
-Assist in creating new products

We need:
-programmers who can integrate the shop into Drupal.org somehow (if possible)
-designers who can design the shop
-an agreement whether or not create a new primary link to the shop
-site maintainers who will create the pages (forum, shop)

Of course you can criticize this post, these are only my ideas.

Submitted by Viko Johns (not verified) on

The big question is if the Drupal association will be directly involved with the evolution of the code. The Drupal Association has no say in either the planning or development of the Drupal open source project itself. This is left solely in the very capable hands of the community. That's great to know!

Essay |
Term Paper |
College Paper

Submitted by personalfinance (not verified) on

Roopal Saran is the Director of Client Services at KaBOOM!, a nonprofit with a vision of creating a great place to play within walking distance of every child in America.

real estate

I think Drupal Association is currently moving forward to be the toughest competitor of Wordpress. I personally like their Dating Templates, something for me to use on my website.

-xo