design drupal.org-redesign

Even though English in not a problem for me, I understand the importance and need to offer a website in other languages, so I really like that the new design have that in mind. Particularly as it also means that the internationalisation support for Drupal is moving up a few notches in priority.

Before I go into the main topic of this post, a little note about the placement of the language select. In the mockup (iteration 11), the select language listbox is placed at the bottom. I think it should actually be placed in the header instead as that will make it much easier to find. Especially those, who's English is not very good tend to leave if they don't find a language quickly without having to scroll to the bottom of a very long page. They could also be shown as flags.

Oki, back to topic. I have one site I am using the Internationalization modules in and it works just fine. The only real issue though is that browsing modules and other add-on stuff and finding information on what languages they are available in is not very easy. In most cases I have to actually download the module and check if it supports translations and if so if it is available in the language(s) I need.

So it got me thinking a bit about how this can be improved on drupal.org and I came up with the following. I will use modules as example, but I believe similar features can be applied on other areas as well, such as themes.

Hi,

We received some fantastic feedback on iteration 6 last week, but we have a few more iterations to go, so your thoughts and comments are more important to the process now than ever before.

You will notice with iteration 7 that we have made some quite drastic changes over the last week ... changes that we feel better serve existing Drupal users AND people new to Drupal. Leisa will be posting shortly (here it is) with our thinking on some of these proposed changes.

So, we've had the 'About' section in the prototype for a while now, and we're turning our attention to the content. We're seeing this section as a place for evaluators of Drupal to make a decision. But also, as this is software, there are things like technical requirements that need to be included.

So we need your opinion and feedback.

What do you think needs to go in this section?
Are we on the right lines with the current prototype?
What do you think the navigation items should be?

Hi,

Following on from last week's call for feedback on iteration 5 of the prototype ... we have now progressed to iteration 6, whereby we have begun to integrate the visual design into the prototype, making the prototype feel more like a website now and less like wireframes.

We encourage you to browse through the prototype and feedback your thoughts and ideas in this thread. The link to the latest iteration is below (please note the slight change in URL - this is because of a new version of Blueprint, and additions to CSS etc.):

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/visual/iteration6

Lets provide users with a better experience, designing for A crappy browser like IE6 will just hold us back, and limit the features that can be done, 37 signals and Apple MobileMe have already announced dropping IE6 support on all their products, shouldn't we make this step as well ?

Making Drupal easier to find, assess and use seem like good fits for the Knight Drupal Initiative.

We all know that there will be a lot of work to do in the redesign, both for theming as well as module development. How about lining up funding for sustained development time and perhaps things like hosted d.o. redesign sprints?