Heine

Leisa and I have spent a good deal of time looking at how we can define the audience for Drupal 7. A couple of weeks ago, we spent a day trying to come up with an effective model to use throughout the design process. Not just a model that we could use, but one that could be available to the whole Drupal community as we embark on the challenging task of looking at the user experience for Drupal 7.

Before I start to talk about this tool, it’s probably better if you just watch this video Leisa and I recorded a week or so ago.

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At Drupalcon DC this year, Kieran and I gave a talk on the current state of drupal.org infrastructure. David Strauss and Derek Wright ended up joining us on stage. It was an interesting chance to get a large part of the drupal.org infra team all on stage together to answer questions.

The video is available here: http://www.archive.org/details/DrupalconDc2009-Drupal.orgInfrastructureS...
The slides are available here: http://nnewton.org/sites/default/files/Infrastructure_team_presentation.ppt

Microsoft announced its Web Application Gallery at its annual MIX conference today. The exciting news for many of us is that Drupal is one of the first 10 applications to be included as part of the Web Application Gallery. Other open source applications including Wordpress, SilverStripe, and Gallery also made into the initial group.

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I spent most of Drupalcon collecting over 50 interviews in the hallways for a new daily podcast series that we'll be talking more about later this week, but I ended up missing a lot of interesting sessions. It was hard to feel like you weren't missing something at Drupalcon this year.

I wanted to be able to be able to download all of the videos from Drupalcon, but there wasn't a one-stop shop that had the direct download links to the highest quality versions of every uploaded video.

I wanted to either use the DownloadThemAll! Firefox plug-in or kick off a download wget script to download them, and so I scraped all of the drupalcon09 archive.org pages, extracted the download links of all the various different versions and then filtered them in a spreadsheet according to whatever the best quality was. The QuickTime *.mov are usually the highest quality, then MPEG4, 512Kb MPEG4 and Ogg Video in that order.

I finished downloading 97 working videos totaling almost 24GB, and so I figured that I'd share the direct links to the highest quality versions down below for anyone else who wants a direct copy.

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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:

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Every now and then a post comes up on Drupal Planet, or somewhere else in the Drupal community describing how the Global Redirect module (GR) is the key to improving your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how it will increase your search engine rankings. But don't be swayed by the SEO voodoo, most sites will see little to no benefit from GR.

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It was pretty obvious from the outset that we’d need some design and UX skills to get us from one end of the Drupal.org redesign project to the other. It was less obvious how important our ’social’ skills would be - and unsurprisingly, we learned a lot about good and bad ways to share the design process with a community along the way.

Here’s a few ’social skills’ we learned:

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"CVS Instructions" tab on the Author Taxonomy module

Drupal's CVS is now more user-friendly!

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I've had the luck again to join Jose A. Reyero and present about the multilanguage features of Drupal and its contributions at Drupalcon DC last week. I've had a presentation on the topic at Drupalcon Szeged last August, and we had a session on the topic at Drupalcon Boston last March with Jose. So looking back it almost felt like we are going to repeat ourselves.

What made this time special however is that we have a huge amount of experience gathered from users of the modules and Drupal core itself, and we see our strengths, real use cases and problems better. Previous sessions covered the concepts, but this time we had the fantastic Roger Lopez join us as third panelist, who talked about the Drupal 6 based multilanguage platform used to host Britney Spears', Pink's and other Sony stars' sites already. There was a nice Drupal.org front page post on their solutions and contributions while we were in DC. It is well worth a read!

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I know I'm a bit late on the monthly challenge this time around, but between the Usability sprint and Drupalcon I've been a bit too hectic to get a post written up. So this will be a short month, but hopefully we can rock it anyway. This month the focus will be on spiffing up our handbook by reviewing what we have and applying the style guide to it. Much like how the coding standards make working with Drupal code a lot nicer (especially for newbies), having consistency and clarity in our handbooks will make it easier for people to understand the firehose of information on any given page. I found that the best way for me to learn Drupal coding standards was to review existing code and help fix it. This month's task should not only help us clean up the docs a bit, but also get more people familiar with the fact that we even have guidelines as well as tucking some things into the back of their minds for next time they write or edit.

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Another Drupalcon has come and gone but our work is not over. A dedicated team is actively at work on Drupalcon Paris and another team is being formed to put on Drupalcon 2010. Drupalcon is built by and is for the community. They are what you want them to be. Help us shape the future of Drupalcon by taking a few minutes to answer the questions in the Drupalcon Survey.

Thanks to every one of the over 1,400 people that showed up in D.C, I hope that we can top that number in Paris and then again in 2010!

I'm back home from a truly spectacular DrupalCon DC and have been reflecting this morning on some of the feedback from my talk: Why I Hate Drupal.

See the slides and watch the video

I first got the idea for this talk several months ago watching the DjangoCon 2008 keynote Why I Hate Django by Cal Henderson. I had several ideas for things to address, but aside from the session description I intentionally said very little about my talk publicly. This, of course, lead to some interesting speculation and negative feedback. All part of the plan.

As it turned out, I was not lynched and nothing rotten was thrown.

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At the Drupalcon DC keynote I was in for a bit of a shock. After Dries had delivered the State of Drupal and its general rockingness, Jose Zamora from the Knight Foundation took the stage. He started talking about the Drupal proposals that were submitted last year to the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI), one of which was mine, for doing Drupal documentation sprints. I had been informed that the board meeting necessary for the decision about which proposals would win funding wouldn't happen until next week so I figured he would just talk about it to spread the word about Knight. Well, turns out he had a surprise: he had confirmed the winners and I was one of them. The Knight Foundation has awarded me $50,500 to make Drupal docs kick ass this year.

For a quick summary, the money will be spent to cover three basic things:

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Last week several of us attended the University of Baltimore to conduct usability testing of Drupal 7.

You should be able to see a video of our DrupalCon presentation soon at the DC 2009 site, and we'll be writing up more blog posts soon to give some background - but for those who can't wait to get stuck in, we've documented over 100 different issues at http://www.drupalusability.org/ - many of these now have drupal.org issues linked, some have patches ready to review already.

While we identified some major issues in testing, a lot of these are one line patches - so even if you've not done much core hacking before you'll be able to find something to work on. You can also help us by taking any issues from the site which don't have a corresponding drupal.org issue, and posting one up - we're tagging everything found in Baltimore with UBUserTesting2009.

As I announced in my keynote presentation at DrupalCon DC this morning, the next code freeze will be on September 1st, a little less than six months from now. It's been more than a year since we started work on Drupal 7, and we have two-thirds of the development cycle behind us.

After September 1, we'll focus on the performance, usability and stability of the code we have in hand, and begin preparing for the release of Drupal 7. As a general rule, after the code freeze, only bug fixes will be allowed.

Announcing a code freeze date is always a little bit dangerous in light of a possible slip, but doing so helps prioritize development efforts and helps end-users in their planning. Drupal 7's release date is still unknown. As always, it's ready when it's ready, and the actual release date will depend on the length of the code freeze, which, in turn, depends on how well the Drupal community continues to embrace test-driven development.

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