Drupal is a Fantastic System, but SUCKS in USABILITY

I apologize for the tone of my post, but this system is driving me nuts. Here's what I'm trying to do. I want to reformat the http://www.eclipsemagazine.com homepage to look more like either a cnn.com or movies.yahoo.com. Is this a views issue
or a Theme issue? I tried using the panels system but it's not documented and I can't quite figure out what's going on with
it.

Why dont you sit down, learn what a particular module does, make a visual representation. In this way you help someone else too.

I am not sure that he/she can do this stuff correctly. What we (Drupaller) MUST do is hear newbie voices and their experiences in Joomla or Wordpress. Joomla known as the most popular CMS and WP is most popular blogging system.

So, Drupal expert must create a better handbook, what is the BETTER Drupal mean?
1. As he/she explain to us, we must put some picture in the handbook
2. We must take a look at Joomla and try to figure out why the most people in the world agree that Joomla is easy to use/understand

Again, we need a Drupal expert to do this, a person who understand Drupal CORRECTLY, don't use a newbie to make a handbook (except for review on the usability perspective). I hope in couple of weeks there will be a better handbook.

Thanks for your voice malexandria.

I understand the voluntary nature of open source and I always hate that excuse. It's designed to make the
users feel guilty for being frustrated. I don't think it's too much to ask that developers think a little more about
end users and not strictly fellow developers. As for "hanging out" in the forums to learn how to do stuff. Frankly,
I don't have the time to spend months in the forums to learn a new system, I have a site I actually have to run, and
several other projects that I want to get off the ground. The point of a CMS is "ease of use," and "maintenance." If I have
to spend months on a learning curve, I would be better off simply building my own CMS.

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.

Samuel Johnson

We get one of these types of posts 2-3 times a year

Seems like more often than that lately, unfortunately.

I am often amazed at the demanding tone of some of these posts - great way to motivate people who volunteer their time. I usually take a long break when I am on the receiving end of that kind of guff. I imagine I'm not the only one.

There are certainly more like 2-3 posts almost identical to this one a week
But more annoyingly, they seem to generate the most responses, many from peeved volunteers, and a few (quite accurate) "yes-buts" from the newbie sympathizers. Most folk have valid concerns (apart from the emotional blackmail claims) and the discussions are usually calm enough.

but tedious

I say that any further non-constructive complaints about support or handbooks get the second half of sepecks post here pasted to the bottom of it and locked ;-)

Honestly, I do think that some way of encouraging/enabling better screen shots in the module projects and handbook pages, as emerged from the discussion here, would be a great leap forward, and make the (admittedly somewhat bland) docs more vibrant - and even accessible. _{I know not every module has a visual effect, but logistical diagrams can sometimes help too.}

OTOH, the best documentation I've found anywhere has consistantly been in the API. Well written code (and it is well written) is its own documentation. If a 'webmaster' or all these site builders complain about having to understand how their system works in order to make their custom changes to it - I can only advise that they employ a developer to do the job instead.

We COULD do with a few more recipes and walkthroughs for setting up a few of the more complicated features, but I'm (personally) just not inspired to work on them without pictures.

.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/

Dear Mr.

There are real reasons to frustration. The number of module is large. Some incompatibilities can appear between modules. Different modules or groups of modules can be used to obtain the same result (most often with different implications that do not appear immediately to new user (e.g. menu access restriction...).

Thus whatever the documentation (and the hard work, thank for it), there are still gaps in the learning and information processes. Furthermore, I do not think that documentation is the sole nor the major problem.

The handbook is in general well documented even so it is difficult to represent what the module do, and learn from a textual abstraction how to manage the module from the visual interface.

Sometimes, the description of the module does not allow to understand what the module adds. It is sometimes like :" the beer.table module allows beer on table". The description add none information compare to the title itself and the user has to imagine the functions and the limitations of the module. If you have a large number of modules that possibly modify the database, the initial deficient information amplifies the user problems.

Comparative informations are lacking inside the drupal site. I have enjoyed such kind of articles from lullabot.
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/private_forums_in_drupal_forum_access_v...
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/a_review_of_node_review_modules
I have myself post a review of chat modules (currently outdated) to the french Drupal site.
Suggestion: add a new type of content (knowledge base) so that community could add links to external articles? This could avoid overloading current workers.

Sincerely

I am new to Drupal and can hardly code.

My experiences with Drupal are positive. Sure it will take time to understand how it all works but that is always the downside of a flexible and powerfull system. Nevertheless I do not think it so hard if you give yourself some time -speaking about hours- to understand the basics.

After my first hours of using Drupal I decided to go what deeper and there it was becomming hard for me as a non coder. I must say tho, that after reading posts on Drupal and searched with google for articles -such as from IBM- it seems that real coders just love the Drupal engine and they praise it for its flexibility and clean code.

While reading the post of this topic starter I found out that on the one hand he is speaking of being an experienced coder and on the other hand that he is not capable of understanding the code and handbook because it is all to much oriented towards technical people. He would like to have pictures and precise describtions of how all the modules can be used in practise.

To me it is clear that you have to be able to code on a high level to fully understand what is going on in the Drupal engine. For a non coder I do agree with the topic starter that examples are very technical oriented but I do not think that it is a must to change that. Real coders will love how information is presented and it seems that, looking at the releases of Drupal lately, they are willing to contribute to such a system. Coders that are fond of easy fixes are not willing to invest in Drupal and I do not think we should mind.

As far as the critics on the use of modules in practise I must say that this is for me a struggle sometimes as well but I understand that this is problem of myself. When you make use of flexible systems the time to figure out how to do something is always the largest and most time consuming part of a good solution.

To conclude, I would say that there is not much wrong with how Drupal is doing. However, I do think that the handbooks could be improved with more visible aspects -such as how to install, setting up your links, making pages etc. just the basics-. Visual aspects do attract people as did the garland theme currently used. It is raising peoples attention on Drupal which is in my opinion a good thing.

Finally I would like to say that I hope we could stay polite to eachother since nobody is making money here and are just helping others which is on itself something amazing I think.

Hello Everyone,

Please calm down. This is why I generally hate posting on websites, because these discussions inevitably rankle peoples feathers.
I will admit that the original tone of my message was borderline flame bait, but you have to understand that my problems started
when I went to upload some modules to my website and it essentially broke everything. It then took me 3 days (11 hrs each)
to try and figure out what the heck was going on. I eventually ended up fixing it. So from that standpoint I was
really frustrated when I posted that article. But despite my original tone, my points are valid and shouldn't be dismissed
simply because this is a "volunteer" project. In an earlier post I said I hate that attitude because saying it's a "volunteer" project,
"why don't you contribute," is a statement designed to put the user in their place and scare people from questioning or dare
to be frustrated by anything that goes on with the project.

I joined the Drupal community because I had hit a wall with things that I wanted to do with Xoops (like multi-site and subdomains) and the development has been "seemingly" nonexistent for several years. I was very involved with that community and lead the documentation efforts and helped keep the devs focused on the end-user experience prior to Xoops launching. The end result is a system that is very User Friendly, easy
to understand and pick up. Drupal on the other requires this huge learning curve, speaks a totally different language than any other
"standard" open source cms system. Nothing about it is very "intuitive," it's powerful and very flexible, sure

But there are certain basic things missing with Drupal, for example the News system is ridiculous, there's a place where you
can post your content - which is great, but to actually "manage," it, well....Before this system can become a true CMS, it needs
to provide some central way of managing CONTENT. Again, I don't say this to slam Drupal, I picked this system over all the others
because it's obviously very powerful and people are designing amazing websites with it. But I shouldn't have to go out and
hire developers to get the results that I want. It defeats the whole point of going with a "free" open source system. Again if I have
to hire developers to work with it, I would hire them to create something from scratch, purchase a reasonably priced
package or break out the old DreamWeaver, NetObjects or Go-Live and do it myself.

In all other CMS - Xoops, Joomla, PHPNuke, Zope, etc, there's one central place called "News General Configuration or Article Configuration, etc." where everything is there, it lists all the recent articles in a table, usually has an ordering feature, a publish/unpublish, publish date, and edit/delete tab. Where's this functionality in Drupal? I know when you post an article, these things are listed under the article, but as "drop down" boxes, my writers have no clue these things are even there - I'm actually going to create a user manual for my writers so they can properly post, I'll post it
on this site when I'm done to show you what I mean by simple and "clear," because I'm writing the guide for my writers who can basically
only use MS Word anything more technical than that their heads explode.

Another thing in most of these other systems, in the news area is a column layout button, where you can simply check a button and it'll automatically change the layout to a 2 or 3 column layout. If you don't like it, it's simple to go back to the regular single column layout. There's usually a
feature where you can set how the news is displayed - headline, teaser, spotlight, etc. Again, all of this is done from one central News admin area. In Drupal to do this stuff you have to hunt and peck through 10 different "modules" the settings, the views, the frontpage module, etc. Or you have to install panels and try and decipher how that works and where the actual pages are that use that. Or maybe design a frontpage in DreamWeaver and then copy and paste that code into the Page module (I think that would work), etc... So to make Drupal easier for use silly, demanding, complaining, whining, stupid, newbies who god forbid don't want to dig into code and hacks, how about creating a real News Module for the core?

Onto the blogging issue, I would like to start blogging, but I'm not entirely clear how to lay it out so that it "looks" like a blog, for instance
I "blogged" from an event a few months ago and the posts looked really cheesy and like any other regular news posting. Now this is clearly
a design issue on my part, but navigationally it just looked, I don't know plain. Just a bunch of teaser text. I don't know how Drupal could
sex that up to make it look more like a wordpress type of thing. Also the commenting system should have a notification option.