On Drupal.org, user HongPong asked a valid question about our Drupal.org upgrade/redesign fundraiser:
I am curious if these codesprint efforts will be useful for other projects. I think it's fantastic so many people are organizing, but I wonder if whatever form the bulk of this takes will be released - or is it mostly a one-off effort that is too customized to be generally useful elsewhere?
I thought it would be useful to have a blog post about this instead of just sending the reply in the comments, since I think this is an important topic to talk about.
- As Niel pointed out, the modules used on Drupal.org will get attention. I've just started to use the "drupal.org upgrade" tag over the weekend to mark issues requiring an attention for the Drupal.org upgrade: http://drupal.org/project/issues-term/346 General purpose existing modules used on the site including simplenews, comment_upload, comment_alter_taxonomy, image or imagefield, and so on will be tested and fixed where required. New modules will be used on Drupal.org and will get similar attention: CCK and Views are the first obvious contenders (right, Drupal.org is not using these modules as of now).
- Drupal.org runs some custom core patches to improve performance by handling master and replicated databases. We will take a deep look on these changes and will implement a similar or better solution for the upgraded site based on Drupal 6. Our caching setup will have similar attention. Having this insight we will be able to document what best practice we found to scale drupal.org. This will join documentation on ways to make Drupal more scalable. Such efforts on Drupal.org also helped improve general performance in Drupal itself (both current stable and current development versions) in the past.
- The upgrade is planned to omit some of the current features on Drupal.org such as the current search implementation and the custom Drupal based distributed login system. OpenID and a new search implementation are about to be implemented in place instead. It will be easier to find stuff on drupal.org for your day-to-day development and you will be able to reuse your Drupal.org account on any OpenID supporting site.
- These items above all happen as products of our upgrade, even if there is no redesign. While all of the above items are great by themselves, the redesign will be the biggest hit. It will help you use a more fine grained navigation, move around the Drupal.org subsites seamlessly, find and understand modules needed for your projects, and so on. But what's even better is that it will be a site you can point possible customers to. It will help you market your services, consulting, books, courses and so on more effectively, since the Drupal site itself will do a better job to help the community and the project market itself and flourish in the times ahead of us. If you earn (part of) your living from Drupal related work, this will give you a boost. If you do not yet earn (part of) your living from Drupal, you'll be more tempted then ever to do so.
We are making exciting things happen, but your help is still vital to make this a reality. You can help by donating some money to get the expert teams together (use the ChipIn widget in this post) or by contributing to the sprints yourself either via the issues listed at http://drupal.org/project/issues-term/346 or by coming to the sprints. Thanks for being part of getting this huge improvement into production!