If Jeremy is happy we’re ALL happy!

From an up and running out of the box perspective, Jeremy probably wants to select at install “This is a blog site” or “This is a photo site”. He’ll happily wait as the regular, but non-core packages (all of the correct/compatible version) are downloaded. When the site comes up won’t he be delighted that it looks something like a blog site that just needs a light touch, which will be easy because the “Starter UX” admin screens are configured more for a blog site.

Configuring Blocks is a bit of a pain too.

Can I get a “check all” for permissions by section and for the whole thing? Sometimes it would be easier to check everything and then uncheck. The current admin makes me not want to create any new roles, it just hurts. If it at least had a copy role, that I could then modify…

Too be fair I’m barely able to get Drupal up and running on my own (but I can) so I’m not very good with Drupal and I’m certainly not a php programmer.

I definitely agree with that idea. The thought of giving someone the ability to jump into an un-themed instance of the current admin site is scary.

I’m a developer – just a not a php or Drupal developer. But I feel more like “Jeremy” – maybe even less so. I can get Drupal up and running – but I’m not taking the time to customize a theme. I’ll let my “clients” (church, neighborhood association, kid’s school, family, etc. – all things unpaid) pick the theme that is the best fit, and then maybe tweak it just a bit. But that almost never entails changing the admin side of the site – and that is what needs it the most if I’m ever going to turn it over to someone else.

And I’ll certainly say this again elsewhere: You need to split out the personas into maybe “perspectives”. (I’m guessing at the appropriate word). Instead of trying to figure out what the “Starter UX” is and _who_ it is for, perhaps thinking of it as what _type_ of website is this, and build the UX around that more than just the persona.

I realize that once you start to combine all the various types of sites, this because more unwieldy/less “Starter UX”, but we’ll call that the “Journey UX” – a little bit of everything, just not every bit.

As someone who manages projects from simple brochure-type sites – with the bulk of the content being fairly static – to very complex sites – with a lot of content types driving complex functionality and high-end themeing – I can tell you that banking the entire farm on a framework that, at times, can be inherently frustrating is a bit tumultuous at best. Since becoming a strictly Drupal shop, I have often wanted to become more active in the Drupal community on a development level. My hope is that I will be able to stabilize our course within these tough economic times enough to allow us to do so at some point. But until then I want to do something that I don’t think is done NEARLY enough, which is to thank those of you who HAVE managed to get to that point. Without you we would be stuck with the Joomla’s of the world, and that is more frightening to me than any trepidation I may have when trying to leverage the strengths of an ever-evolving framework.

We love Drupal!

I’d love to see a UX project which worked like the theme system, switch the UX on Drupal at the touch of a button.

Make a Starter UX, a Journey US, and an Expert UX.

Leave the Expert UX exactly as it stands today and focus changes on the Starter and Journeyman levels. That would allow us to meet the needs of new users without being blocked at every turn by experienced Drupalers who don’t want to relearn the system.

On a bit of a separate note, UX people always forget that most UXs are easy once people are used to them. It’s not like we’re born knowing that underlined text is a hyperlink . And don’t make the train track mistake of thinking that we need to meet the expectations of new users when it comes to a UX, functionality and logical structure are more important because those characteristics will make people want to use the software and make it reasonably easy for anyone to learn, regardless of background.

The short answer is that Drupal 7 is still being built! It’s under heavy development now, and probably won’t be officially released until late this year or early next year. But there are already tons of improvements over Drupal 6, both in terms of functionality and in terms of UX. This site here is where some mockups of possible UX improvements are being designed and discussed, but the overall work to implement changes happens on drupal.org and is ongoing. You can see some of the overall community initiatives here and get involved if you want to: http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core (some of that page is aimed a bit at people with heavy Drupal experience, but other parts aren’t).

So if you’re building a site right now, you should definitely use Drupal 6; Drupal 7 is not yet ready for production use. But no worries, because there’s an upgrade path, so once Drupal 7 is available and you’re ready to use it, you’ll be able to upgrade your site to take advantage of the new features and improvements.