Dries Buytaert

This week, twelve of us have gathered in Paris to continue our work on upgrading drupal.org. Sprinters include: Joeri Poesen, Damien Tournoud, Neil Drumm, Mike O'Conner, Gerhard Killesreiter, Klaas Van Waesberghe, Todd Ross Nienkerk, Aaron Stanush, David Stosik, Morten Heide, Gábor Hojtsy and myself. Upgrading and redesigning drupal.org is a big project, and, when implemented, will be an important milestone for our community. We're hopeful that we can push the drupal.org redesign closer to completion this week.

The Boston sprint two weeks ago was dedicated to upgrading drupal.org from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 in preparation for this week's redesign. We worked hard, putting in 12-14 hour days, fleshing out solutions over breakfast, lunch and dinner and left only a short time for sleep. As a result, we're close to being able to upgrade drupal.org from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

This week in Paris, our group is split into two teams. One group will implement the new theme designed by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt with the involvement of many people in our community. The second group will continue where we left off in Boston and will also start implementing some of the new functionality planned for the new drupal.org (e.g. better search, improved project pages, better landing pages, a jobs page, an events page, and more).

These week-long sprints are non-trivial. Although all of the participants invest their own time free of charge, we'd like to cover their airfare, hotel and some of the food required to keep them running. We've only been able to hold these sprints due to your generous contributions in the past; we still need to raise more funds so it is not too late to donate.

A number of organizations, including One Laptop Per Child, AF83, Four Kitchens, DrupalTherapy, OpenBand and Looforyoo, Capgemini France, NowPublic, Tag1consulting, and Acquia have already come forward with donations of money and resources to help make these sprints be successful.

At the end of the sprint, we'll update you on our progress, so please stay tuned for details.