Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

The Drupal Association team is gearing up for DrupalCon Baltimore. We're excited to see you there and we'll presenting a panel giving an update on our work since Dublin, and our plans for the coming months.

Drupal.org updates

Project application revamp

As we announced in mid-March, new contributors on Drupal.org can now create full projects and releases! Contributors no longer have to wait in the project application queue for a manual review before they are able to contribute projects.

This is a very significant change in the Drupal contribution landscape, and it's something we approached carefully and will continue to monitor over the coming months. Drupal has always had a reputation for a high quality code, and we want to make sure that reputation is preserved with good security signals, project quality signals, and continued incentives for peer code review.

That said, we're very excited to see how this change opens up Drupal to a wider audience of contributors.

Description

There will be a security release of Drupal 8.3.x and 8.2.x on April 19th 2017 between
17:00 - 18:00 UTC that will fix a critical vulnerability. While we don't normally provide security releases for unsupported minor releases, given the potential severity, we will provide an 8.2.x release that includes the fix for sites which have not had a chance to update to 8.3.0. The Drupal Security Team urges you to reserve time for core updates at that time because exploits are expected to be developed within hours or days. Security release announcements will appear at the standard announcement locations.

This vulnerability does not affect all Drupal 8 sites; it only affects sites with certain configurations. It requires authenticated user access to exploit. The security release announcement on April 19th 2017 will make it clear which configurations are affected. If this vulnerability affects your site, you will need to update. Please set aside time on Wednesday to look into this update.

Neither the Security Team, nor Security Team members, nor any Drupal-related company are able to release any more information about this vulnerability until the announcement is made in accordance with our security policies and responsible disclosure best practices.

We provide pre-release warnings when we believe the security risk is high and the steps to exploit are scriptable.

Drupal 7 core is not affected by this issue.

Contact and More Information

The Drupal security team can be reached at security at Drupal.org or via the contact form at https://www.drupal.org/contact.

In October of last year the Technical Advisory Committee was formed to evaluate options for the developer tools we use on Drupal.org. The TAC consists of Angie Byron, Moshe Weitzman, and Steve Francia, acting as advisors to Megan Sanicki, the Executive Director of the Drupal Association.

The TAC's mandate is to recommend a direction for the future of our tools on Drupal.org. Megan will evaluate this recommendation, make a decision, and prioritize that work in the development roadmap of the Drupal Association engineering team.

What is the motivation behind looking at our developer tools now?

Close followers of the Drupal project will have noticed a trend in the last several months. From Dries' announcement of easy upgrades forever, to the revamp of the project application process, to the discussion about making tools for site builders— there is a unifying theme: broadening the reach of Drupal.

This is the same motivation that underlies this evaluation of our developer tools, and defines the goals and constraints of this initiative:

This means looking at a number of elements of the Drupal.org developer tool stack:

Drupal 8.3.0, the third minor release of Drupal 8, is now available. With Drupal 8, we made significant changes in our release process, adopting semantic versioning and scheduled feature releases. This allows us to make extensive improvements to Drupal 8 in a timely fashion while still providing backwards compatibility.

Update: Drupal 8.3.1 is available and fixes a security vulnerability. You should update directly to 8.3.1 instead of 8.3.0.

What's new in Drupal 8.3.0?

This new version includes improvements to authoring experience, site administration, REST support, and a stable version of the BigPipe module. It also includes new experimental modules to abstract workflow functionality, to lay out content types differently (e.g. articles are two column vs. press releases are three column), and to provide a general layout API for contributed modules. Many smaller improvements for the experimental Content Moderation module are included as well. (Experimental modules are provided with Drupal core for testing purposes, but are not yet fully supported.)

Download Drupal 8.3.1

New and improved content authoring

Drupal 8.3 ships with the updated CKEditor 4.6, which contains a host of improvements, including better paste from Word, and a new default skin that better matches Drupal's Seven administration theme. We've also added the AutoGrow plugin, to better utilize larger screen sizes.

This is a joint statement from project lead Dries Buytaert and Megan Sanicki, Drupal Association Executive Director.

Over the last week, the Drupal community has been in a debate over the various decisions made by us in relation to long-time Drupal developer Larry Garfield. As with any such decisions, and especially due to the circumstances of this one, there has been controversy, misinformation and rumors, as well as healthy conversation and debate. Many people feel hurt, worried, and confused. The fact that this matter became very public and divisive greatly saddens all of us involved, especially as we can see the pain it has caused many.

First off, we want to apologize for not responding sooner. We had to take a pause to process the community’s reaction.  We also wanted to take the time to talk to community members to make sure all of the concerns were heard and understood. This was further complicated by the fact that we don't have a playbook for how to respond in unusual situations like this. We also want to acknowledge that our communication has not been as clear as it should be on this matter, and we are sorry for the added confusion.

We want to thank all of the community members who stepped in to help. Many spent days helping other community members by listening, hosting discussions to foster healthy, respectful conversations, and more. You have helped many people and your caring acts reminded us once again why we love to serve the community and why it is so special.

Over the last week, we talked to many people and read hundreds of posts in various channels. These are some of the things that we heard:

The staff and board of the Drupal Association would like to congratulate our newest board member:

Ryan Szrama.

Thank you, Ryan, for stepping forward to serve the Drupal community. On behalf of the community I also want to thank the 13 candidates who put themselves out there in service of Drupal and nominated themselves. We are grateful that our community has so many brave and generous people willing to contribute this way.

Ryan's election to the board represents the sixth year of elections to a community-at-large seat on the Drupal Association board. Each year we've focused on improving the elections process, and this year was no different. We focused on two goals: 

Our next steps will be to reach out to the candidates for their evaluation of the elections experience.

We also want to hear from the voters. Please tell us about your experience with the elections process in the comments below. Your feedback is important to us so that we can make the 2018 elections process even better. 

We understand that there is uncertainty and concern in the Drupal community about project founder, Dries Buytaert, asking Larry Garfield to leave the Drupal community, and about the Drupal Association removing Larry's DrupalCon sessions and ending his term as track chair.

We want to be clear that the decision to remove Larry's DrupalCon session and track chair role was not because of his private life or personal beliefs. The Drupal Association stands by our values of inclusivity. Our decision was based on confidential information conveyed in private by many sources. Due to the confidential nature of the situation we cannot and will not disclose any information that may harm any members of our community, including Larry.

This decision followed our established process. As the Executive Director, charged with safekeeping the goodwill of the organization, I made this decision after considering input from various sources including the Community Working Group (CWG) and Drupal Project Lead, Dries Buytaert. Upon Larry’s request for an appeal, the full board reviewed the situation, all the evidence, and statements provided by Larry. After reviewing the entirety of the information available (including information not in the public view) the decision was upheld.

In order to protect everyone involved we cannot comment more, and trust that the community will be understanding.  

We do see that there are many feelings and questions around this DrupalCon decision and we empathize with those community members. We will continue to monitor comments. We are listening.

This case study was written as a collaboration between Drupal Association staff and Technology Supporting Partner Distil Networks.

Drupal.org is the home of one of the largest open source communities in the world. We've been online for more than 13 years and collectively we build the Drupal software, provide support, write documentation, share networking opportunities, and more. The open source spirit pushes the Drupal project forward, and new members are always welcome. It falls to us to maintain our community home and preserve the welcoming atmosphere that leads people to say,"Come for the code, stay for the community."  

As stewards of Drupal.org, it's our responsibility to give the community a voice and welcome everyone who wants to participate in the project. At the same time, there are bad actors who would take advantage of our open community and platform for abusive purposes.

Drupal.org long-standing presence on the web has given it authority in the eyes of search engines. The site hosts millions of pages of content - all generated by our users. This combination of authority and open access for users to create content makes us a very high value target for phishers and spammers.

Spam is a nuisance to our existing community, devalues our project to the newcomers we are hoping to welcome, and left unchecked could degrade our search presence.

Any user on Drupal.org who has accepted our Git usage policy may now create full projects with releases. This is a big change in policy for the Drupal project, representing an evolution of the contribution ecosystem in the past half a decade.

What was the Project Application Process?

Ever since the days when Drupal's code was hosted in CVS there has been some form of project application process in the Drupal Community. To prevent duplicate, low-quality, insecure, or otherwise undesirable projects from flooding Drupal, users would submit sandbox projects to an application queue to be reviewed by a group of volunteers.

After resolving any issues raised in this review process, the user would be given the git vetted role, allowing them to promote their sandbox to a full project, claim a namespace, and create releases. Once a user had been vetted for their first project, they would remain vetted and be able to promote any future projects on their own, without submitting an additional application.

The Problem

Unfortunately, though the project application process was created with the best of intentions, in the long term it proved not to be sustainable. Drupal grew too fast for a group of volunteer reviewers to keep up with reviewing new projects, and at times there were applications waiting in queue for 6 months to 1 year, or even more. That is much too slow in the world of software development.

This put Drupal in a difficult situation. After years of subjecting new projects and contributors to a rigorous standard of peer review, Drupal has a well-deserved reputation for code quality and security. Unlike many open source projects, we largely avoided the problem of having many duplicate modules that exist to serve the same purpose. We unified our community’s effort, and kept up a culture of collaboration and peer review. At the same time, many would-be contributors were unable or unwilling to navigate the application process and so simply chose not to contribute.

Drupal 8.2.7, a maintenance release which contains fixes for security vulnerabilities, is now available for download.

Update your existing Drupal 8 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features nor non-security-related bug fixes in this release. See the 8.2.7 release notes for details on important changes and known issues affecting this release. Read on for details of the security vulnerabilities that were fixed in this release.

Description

Editor module incorrectly checks access to inline private files - Drupal 8 - Access Bypass - Critical - CVE-2017-6377

When adding a private file via a configured text editor (like CKEditor), the editor will not correctly check access for the file being attached, resulting in an access bypass.

Some admin paths were not protected with a CSRF token - Drupal 8 - Cross Site Request Forgery - Moderately Critical - CVE-2017-6379

Some administrative paths did not include protection for CSRF. This would allow an attacker to disable some blocks on a site. This issue is mitigated by the fact that users would have to know the block ID.

Remote code execution - Drupal 8 - Remote code execution - Moderately Critical - CVE-2017-6381

A 3rd party development library including with Drupal 8 development dependencies is vulnerable to remote code execution.

Republished from buytaert.net, please post your comments there.

One of the key reasons that Drupal has been successful is because we always made big, forward-looking changes. As a result, Drupal is one of very few CMSes that has stayed relevant for 15+ years. The downside is that with every major release of Drupal, we've gone through a lot of pain adjusting to these changes. The learning curve and difficult upgrade path from one major version of Drupal to the next (e.g. from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8) has also held back Drupal's momentum. In an ideal world, we'd be able to innovate fast yet provide a smooth learning curve and upgrade path from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. We believe we've found a way to do both!

Upgrading from Drupal 8.2 to Drupal 8.3

Before we can talk about the upgrade path to Drupal 9, it's important to understand how we do releases in Drupal 8. With the release of Drupal 8, we moved Drupal core to use a continuous innovation model. Rather than having to wait for years to get new features, users now get sizeable advances in functionality every six months. Furthermore, we committed to providing a smooth upgrade for modules, themes, and distributions from one six-month release to the next.

This new approach is starting to work really well. With the 8.1 and 8.2 updates behind us and 8.3 close to release, we have added some stable improvements like BigPipe and a new status report page, as well as experimental improvements for outside-in, workflows, layouts, and more. We also plan to add important media improvements in 8.4.

Most importantly, upgrading from 8.2 to 8.3 for these new features is not much more complicated than simply updating for a bugfix or security release.

Join us at DrupalCon Baltimore from April 24-28 for a week of inspiration, networking, and learning. Meet Drupal experts and industry leaders who will share new ways to create digital experiences that delight customers, citizens, students, patients, and more.

The event offers programming for decision makers (CIO/Director) as well as digital teams (developers, project managers, site builders, content strategists). Be sure to check out these suggested sessions for both audiences.

Top Five Reasons To Attend DrupalCon

Register today. Prices increase March 24th. Attendees can come for the week or just for a day. Plus, the Baltimore Convention Center is easy to reach - just 30 minutes from Baltimore Washington Airport and 15 minutes from the Amtrak Station.

We look forward to seeing you at DrupalCon Baltimore!

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

Drupal.org updates

Industry Pages Launched

After a great deal of preparation, user research, and content development we've launched the first three 'Drupal in your Industry' pages. These first three pages highlight the power of Drupal in Media and Publishing, Higher Education, and Government. Each of these pages uses geo-targeted content to reach audiences in: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; and the Asia Pacific, Australia and New Zealand regions.

These pages are targeted at evaluators of Drupal in these specific industries. From our research, we've found that these evaluators typically have Drupal on their short list of technology choices, but are not familiar with how a complete solution is built on Drupal, and they're eager to see success stories from their industry peers.

We'll be expanding on this initiative with additional industry pages as time goes on.

Project Application Revamp

In February we completed phases 1 and 2 of the Project Application Process Revamp. This has meant polishing up the security advisory coverage messages that are provided on project pages, adding a new field for vetted users to opt-in to advisory coverage for their projects, and adding security advisory coverage information to the updates xml served from Drupal.org. With these issues complete we'll be able to move forward with Phase 3 (opening the project promotion gates) and Phase 4 (improving code quality signals and incentivizing peer review) as we roll into March.

The Engineering Team provides support to many community members and everyone at the Association. Every day, the team helps people who are at different stages of the Drupal adoption journey. As part of our membership campaign, we're taking a close look at how the team makes an impact throughout this cycle through the work to support a few different Association programs.

Industry Pages: convincing decision makers to adopt Drupal

The team played a key role in the Industry Pages project—from conception to execution. The industry pages help decision makers see how Drupal achieves the vision Dries' set forth when he described Drupal as the platform for ambitious digital experiences.

The first three industry pages for media and publishing, higher education, and government are now on Drupal.org. These pages tell stories of success with Drupal for three verticals with geo-targeted content to show our global audience the solutions that are most meaningful to them. We plan to learn from this project and to expand into new verticals. By highlighting what Drupal can do for you, and connecting decision makers to service providers and industry peers, the industry pages are a powerful tool for leading the way to wider adoption.

Drupal Jobs: wider adoption leads to more career opportunities

The team is responsible for Drupal Jobs, the subsite dedicated to helping employers and job seekers connect for Drupal-related opportunities. Ever since Drupal Jobs launched in 2015, it has helped increase awareness of the Drupal project. As the pool of employers grows, so do the career opportunities. When more Drupal jobs are available, our ecosystem grows. Wider Drupal adoption becomes possible.

DrupalCon: Events site brings us full circle

DrupalCon unites our global community and people who want to know more about the project. On the Events site, the engineering team supports everyone—event organizers who post content, speakers who submit sessions, and attendees who register using Drupal Commerce and CoD. With a great UX on con sites and fun theme implementation, we show users what Drupal can do for you.

Voting is now open for the 2017 At-Large Board positions for the Drupal Association!  If you haven't yet, check out the candidate profiles including their short videos found on the profile pages. Get to know your candidates, and then get ready vote.

Cast Your Vote!

How does voting work? Voting is open to all individuals who have a Drupal.org account by the time nominations open and who have logged in at least once in the past year.

To vote, you will rank candidates in order of your preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). The results will be calculated using an "instant runoff" method. For an accessible explanation of how instant runoff vote tabulation works, see videos linked in this discussion.

Elections will be held from 6 March, 2017 through 18 March, 2017. During this period, you can review and comment on the candidate profiles.

As you know, we've been highlighting the work of the Drupal Association Engineering Team during our membership campaign. Every day, this small team moves the needle forward so that we all have a better experience as users of Drupal.org. In this post, we explore how the team's recent work results in faster, less expensive Drupal development.  

Helping Drupal development move faster with DrupalCI

DrupalCI testbots are the next generation of testing infrastructure for Drupal.org, funded by the Drupal Association and maintained by the Engineering team. For any project on the site, DrupalCI testing can be enabled from the Automated Testing link on the Project page. Every time a contribution to the Drupal project needs to be tested, DrupalCI spins up a testbot on AWS to test those changes. The DrupalCI testbots are helping Drupal contributors to test patches faster than ever before and they are more cost effective than our last generation testbots, both in price-per-test and in expense to maintain.

In recent months, we've added a number of new features including:

checkstyle testing to ensure code contributions adhere to Drupal coding standards

automatic builds of vagrant boxes so you can easily use DrupalCI testing on your local machine

The first release candidate for the upcoming Drupal 8.3.0 release is now available for testing. Drupal 8.3.0 is expected to be released April 5.

8.3.x includes new experimental modules for workflows, layout discovery and field layouts; raises stability of the BigPipe module to stable and the Migrate module to beta; and includes several REST, content moderation, authoring experience, performance, and testing improvements among other things. You can read a detailed list of improvements in the announcements of alpha1 and beta1.

What does this mean to me?

For Drupal 8 site owners

The final bugfix release of 8.2.x has been released. A final security release window for 8.2.x is scheduled for March 15, but 8.2.x will receive no further releases following 8.3.0, and sites should prepare to update from 8.2.x to 8.3.x in order to continue getting bug and security fixes. Use update.php to update your 8.2.x sites to the 8.3.x series, just as you would to update from (e.g.) 8.2.4 to 8.2.5. You can use this release candidate to test the update. (Always back up your data before updating sites, and do not test updates in production.)

For module and theme authors

Drupal 8.3.x is backwards-compatible with 8.2.x. However, it does include internal API changes and API changes to experimental modules, so some minor updates may be required. Review the change records for 8.3.x, and test modules and themes with the release candidate now.

For translators

Some text changes were made since Drupal 8.2.0. Localize.drupal.org automatically offers these new and modified strings for translation. Strings are frozen with the release candidate, so translators can now update translations.

Did you know you have a say in who is on the Drupal Association Board? Each year, the Drupal community votes in a member who serves two years on the board. It’s your chance to decide which community voice you want to represent you in discussions that set the strategic direction for the Drupal Association. Go here for more details.

Voting takes place from March 6 - March 18. Anyone who has a Drupal.org profile page and has logged in to their account in the last year is eligible to vote. This year, there are many candidates from around the world. Now it’s time for you to meet them.

Meet the candidates

We just concluded the phase where 13 candidates nominated themselves for the board seat. From now through March 4, 2017 we encourage you to check out each person’s candidate profile, where they explain which board discussion topics they are most passionate about and what perspectives they will bring to the board.

This year, we asked candidates to include a short video - a statement of candidacy - that summarizes why you should vote for them. Be sure to check them out. Videos are found in the candidate’s profile as well as here:

What To Consider

When reviewing the candidates, it is helpful to know what the board is focusing on over the next year or two, so you can decide who can best represent you.

The Drupal Association Engineering Team delivers value to all who are using, building, and developing Drupal. The team is tasked with keeping Drupal.org and all of the 20 subsites and services up and running. Their work would not be possible without the community and the project would not thrive without close collaboration. This is why we are running a membership campaign all about the engineering team. These are a few of the recent projects where engineering team + community = win!

Want to hear more about the work of the team, rather than read about it? Check out this video from 11:15-22:00 where Tim Lehnen (@hestenet) talks about the team's recent and current work.

Leading the Documentation System migration

We now have a new system for Documentation. These are guides Drupal developers and users need to effectively build and use Drupal. The new system replaces the book outline structure with a guides system, where a collection of pages with their own menu are maintained by the people who volunteer to keep the guides updated, focused, and relevant. Three years of work from the engineering team and community collaborators paid off. Content strategy, design, user research, implementation, usability testing and migration have brought this project to life.

Pages include code 'call-outs' for point-version specific information or warnings.

Thanks to the collaborators: 46 have signed up to be guide maintainers, the Documentation Working Group members (batigolix, LeeHunter, ifrik, eojthebrave), to tvn, and the many community members who write the docs!

Drupal.org is home of the Drupal project and the Drupal community. It has been continuously operating since 2001. The Engineering Team— along with amazing community webmasters— keeps Drupal.org alive and well. As we launch the first membership campaign of 2017, our story is all about this small and productive team.

Join us as we celebrate all that the engineering team has accomplished. From helping grow Drupal adoption, to enabling contribution; improving infrastructure to making development faster. The team does a lot of good for the community, the project, and Drupal.org.

Check out some of their accomplishments and if you aren't yet a Drupal Association member, join us! Help us continue the work needed to make Drupal.org better, every day.

Share these stories with others - now until our membership drive ends on March 8.

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