Help make Drupal7 amazing - what we're doing at Drupalcon
You may have heard the excellent and very exciting news that following on from our work on Drupal.org, Mark Boulton Design has been contracted to take a look at the User Experience for the upcoming Drupal 7, and I'm very happy to be working with him on this project as well.
Our last project, Drupal.org, kicked off at the Drupalcon in Szeged which was a fantastic way to begin the process of immersing ourselves in and communicating with the amazing Drupal community. Happily, this project will also kick off at a Drupalcon, this time in Washington DC and starting next week - if you're going to be there we would love to meet you and I thought you might like to know of two of the activities we plan to kick of whilst at the conference.
1. Blue Sky Design Workshops
We're going to be running 3 workshops during the conference that we'd love you to participate in, they're going to be held on Wednesday 3-4pm, and Thursday 9-10am and 11.30-12.30pm.
We're calling them 'design' workshops, but that doesn't mean they're meant for designers only. These workshops are made up of a few fun activities that will help us explore the boundaries of what Drupal 7 could be. We want people from all different backgrounds and areas of expertise, and all levels of experience with Drupal - the only thing you need to be passionate about Drupal and the desire to see the next version of Drupal have an amazing User Experience to come along.
If you're interested in participating, signup for one of the workshops using one of the links below:
Wednesday 3-4pm
Thursday 9-10am
Thursday 11.30-12.30pm
There's only space for 10 people per workshop, so get in quick!
(If you do try to register and all the workshops are booked out, there's a waiting list here. Yes, we're optimistic!)
2. Pimp My Admin
The second activity we're launching at Drupalcon is a little activity we're code-naming 'Pimp My Admin'. This is how it works...
One of the great things about Drupal is that you can bend it to your will - get it to do just about anything you need it to do. Same goes for it's administration interface (admin).
Before we get to redesigning the Drupal7 Admin, we'd love to see what you out there have done to make the Drupal Admin System do what you need it to do, or just to work better for you and your project.
Here's how we want to do it - simply take a little screencast, see if you can make it shorter than five minutes - walk us through your admin system and show us what you've done, even if it's just something tiny - to make Drupal work better for you. Then you can either send it to us or, better still, post it up to YouTube - we're still working out the details of exactly how to share these screencasts, but stay tuned for details. Meanwhile, if you're going to be at Drupalcon, come find us and we'd be more than happy to sit down and do a screencast with you!
Come find us!
Even if you're not interested in either of those activities, if you're at Drupalcon and you're interested in the redesign, please do come and say hello. We're hoping to be very conspicuous and easy to find and we'll have our suggestion box out and our ears reading for bending. We're looking forward to meeting you and learning lots!
Trying not to be a spoil sport :)
Hi all,
It was great seeing the final designs of the revamped drupal.org and truly appreciate the work MBD has done to get there and enjoyed the path taken (flickr group, twitter and lots other ways of gathering community feedback). All in all the marriage of a kick ass CMS and an awesome design studio was great to witness. I've a question though about this new announcement of contracting MBD in revamp of drupal 7 usability. Isn't it like Gnome/KDE hiring Adobe for improving the UI (I refrain from using apple instead of Adobe as that would mean competitors and MBD is not a competitor to drupal in any way). I mean drupal over the years have been developed and envisioned by and awesome open minded community including the UI it brought and the evolution it underwent. I am really confused and not sure what to make of it.
Geek in me says let community evolve it the way it has been (you are part of community as well but then I am not sure what does the term contracting means)
The entrepreneur/drupal lover in me says go for a pro design studio as it would result in widespread adoption of drupal (over wordpress though I dont even see a competition there)
Having written all that I am sure MBD will work with community as it did in drupal.org redesign and would take inputs from long threaded mails in development mailing list about "Administration revamp" and all scattered threads about drupal usability.
Thanks
Dipen Chaudhary
http://dipenchaudhary.com
http://playdrupal.com
This is very exciting Leisa!
This is very exciting Leisa!
I think the community has struggled for some time to have one coherent design strategy. Oh the possibilities! Like everyone, my excitement will stem into some questions I've been rattling around in my head:
As always, thanks for listening. See you guys at DC/DC!
Josh
Post a heads up in the usability group
Regarding johsmiller's point 2, I suggest you post a notice about this group in http://groups.drupal.org/usability . I'm pretty sure most people there will be interested in what's going on here, and would want to be notified.
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Hilde Austlid, Drupalchick
done! thanks.
done! thanks.