The redesigned Drupal.org homepage. The main text reads "Create Ambitious Digital Experiences. Drupal is a fully composable CMS that allows you to design a digital experience to your vision." A woman with curly dark hair, wearing a patterned sweater and holding a laptop, is pictured next to this text. The background features a light blue abstract geometric pattern.

The Drupal Association

Serving community members, old and new

A site modernization to showcase the best of Drupal

Drupal is a fully composable content management platform, supported by a robust open source community. Lauded for its high security, Drupal is trusted by over half of all Fortune 500 companies, as well as governments in over 150 countries.

The Drupal Association is the non-profit organization focused on accelerating Drupal, fostering the growth of the Drupal community, and supporting the project’s vision to create a safe, secure, and open web for everyone. The Association also administers Drupal.org on behalf of the Drupal community.

Visit the site

The Drupal Association had been looking to modernize drupal.org, the Drupal community’s online home, for some time. In early 2024, the site was still running on Drupal 7—and with Drupal 10 well-established and Drupal 11 imminent, it was no longer showcasing Drupal's full capabilities. The Drupal Association decided to partner with Palantir.net to modernize and migrate the site. They trusted Palantir to deliver a performant, user-focused site that would support their existing community and drive their marketing efforts to new heights.

In addition to the technical migration, the Association wanted a well-designed, UX-focused site that would capitalize on the design and content work already carried out by the Promote Drupal team. Promote Drupal was an initiative started in 2018 to improve and standardize product messaging and resources; promote key Drupal initiatives, such as Drupal CMS; and generally promote adoption and support for Drupal.

In order to support the wider organization’s product marketing goals, the modernization had multiple key objectives:

Upgrade drupal.org from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, showing Drupal’s latest capabilities in action
Build the website in such a way that upgrading to future versions of Drupal would be as seamless as possible, to continue demonstrating the cutting edge of what Drupal has to offer into the future
Use wireframes and design guidelines developed by the Promote Drupal initiative to improve visuals and user experience
Include new product marketing content developed by Promote Drupal, to educate evaluators and spur Drupal adoption
Streamline navigation for evaluators and visitors outside of the Drupal community, whilst also maintaining user experience for all users across the site

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Move fast and don't break things

The potential wins for this project were significant, but so were the challenges. Drupal.org isn’t just a static product marketing website— it’s also the online home of the Drupal community. In addition to the marketing landing pages, the site acts as a theme browser, documentation portal, security information provider, and vendor marketplace, all in one. With 12,000 pages of documentation and 50,000 modules on the site, the project's scope was sizable. Additionally, the old site design had been in use for many years, and wasn’t component-based. This presented design challenges each time new types of content were added to the site.

As the site provides so many vital resources to the community, downtime or buggy implementation was not an option. The Drupal Association wanted a plan to progressively migrate the site and broaden their community without impinging upon the work and activities of their current userbase.

Additionally, to meet the marketing goals and timelines of the wider Association, the team needed to have at least a new homepage ready for community review by DrupalCon Barcelona in September 2024— giving a small team a matter of months to complete this ambitious project.

Technical expertise with deep understanding

The Drupal Association turned to us at Palantir.net to help them with this formidable task. The Drupal Association was already familiar with Palantir’s work; we’re a Diamond-level Drupal Certified Partner with a long history of contributing to key Drupal advancements. Most recently, we worked on EditTogether, a multi-user, field-level editing solution.

“I’d interacted with a number of Palantir team members over the years on other technical Drupal initiatives,” explained Tim Lehnen, Drupal Association CTO. “But what really clinched it for us was the rapport with the team. Palantir fundamentally understood the complexities of what we were trying to do. We really gelled, and they had a strong handle on how we were going to have to undertake this project to make it work.”

Three colorful cards against a dark blue background titled "Extend Drupal." Each card represents a way to extend Drupal: "Modules" (lavender) to add functionality, "Themes" (yellow) to change the look and feel, and "Recipes" (blue) to use pre-configured features. Each card has a download button.

User-focused, repeatable design

We aimed to provide the Drupal Association with a solid roadmap for the progressive migration of the site, as well as setting them up with repeatable processes and documentation to support them into the future.

Devised an incremental migration plan to get new pages in front of the Drupal community as fast as possible, while also maintaining existing support and services
Developed a comprehensive UX strategy including research, usability testing, and accessibility compliance
Tested and enhanced existing Figma designs based on the work of the Promote Drupal group, focusing on UX and accessibility standpoints
Implemented a component-based design system to ensure uniform design and content architecture across the site, and simplify adding new content types in the future
Developed components and design system for community use, and created Storybook documentation to help others quickly onboard to site development
Built new webpages using the components, ready for launch by DrupalCon Barcelona

Positive feedback and community consensus

The new homepage was live for DrupalCon Barcelona in September 2024, as were several key product marketing landing pages. The new site showcased the best of Promote Drupal’s design efforts, while the technical implementation led to dramatic improvements in test coverage across the new site. The new site launched at “new.drupal.org”, slotting the new pages into the site’s existing architecture and giving the time team to gather crucial feedback before fully replacing the existing homepage.

“The launch at Barcelona was met with a lot of positive reactions from both inside and outside the community,” Lehnen shared. “We got a ton of feedback, and there was a clear understanding that we were still prioritizing the important community spaces— the developer tools, the contributor guides— whilst serving the goal of increasing Drupal adoption and promoting its reputation.”

In the following months, we iterated on the feedback gathered at DrupalCon Barcelona, to get the new homepage ready for the official launch. In December 2024, drupal.org fully switched to the new design, garnering 26,000 hits on the new homepage in the first week.

Building on success

The Drupal Association opted for our Continuous Delivery Portfolio (CDP), offering them ongoing support, technical expertise, and strategic consulting for the next phases of the site modernization. Together, we’re currently focusing on continued feature buildout, and implementing adjustments based on ongoing user feedback.

“The way Palantir has helped to educate our internal team has gone above and beyond,” Lehnen said. “Our partnership has been really powerful not only for getting the work done, but also empowering us to make additional changes, carry out work outside of the scope, and collaboratively keep the momentum high.”

If your team could benefit from additional expertise to complete ambitious projects with longevity and community trust, get in touch.

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