From the user conference aka DrupalCon Part 1 at Portland State University on Tuesday August 2nd and the free Drupal BOF at OSCON on August 4th, I learned that it's all about the people. Drupal has awesome technology but the biggest challenge going forward in my opinion is harnessing that technology to meet people's needs and making people aware of how they can use that technology.
Here's some of my impressions from DrupalCon Portland 2005 Part 1 - For Users:
- We are all users. And users will drive the adoption and the evolution of the platform so we should listen carefully to what they say and do what we can to make things better.
- We have everything in place to take Drupal to the next level where there are far more users than developers, consultants, community builders and documenters. We have the consultants, the developers, the trainers, etc. We just need to grow and nurture this community or ecosystem. Easier said than done but there are precedents e.g. Mozilla, MySQL, etc. I asked Asa Dotzler at his OSCON Mozilla community session if there was a book on open source community building (Mozilla's community is Drupal's community writ large or Drupal is where Mozilla was a few years back) and of course there isn't. But still much to learn from them.
- Those of us already in the ecosystem have to welcome new people and document the entry points into the community, create more entry points and ways to work with the community. I don't think this is 100% clear for even developers; it certainly isn't for documenters and others.
- John VanDyk's Content Construction Kit coupled with next generation forms from Adrian Rossouw give the users what they want: the ability to create new types of content without programming and without database administrators in a scalable, robust way. This is something no other CMS has AFAIK.
- John VanDyk's publish and subscribe which enables the flow of rich data up and down a collection of Drupal (and perhaps other) sites is also badly needed by users. It's increasingly (like Doug Kaye's IT conversations and learning institutions and organizations with lots of sites like REALNEO) about having a family or umbrella of sites. Stuff should live in the appropriate site and flow to other sites that are relevant. RSS is as Boris says the lowest common denominator. With publish and subscribe we can do this much better. Again, AFAIK, no other CMS is doing this.
- CiviCRM is rocks. The best is yet to come for this project!
- Ajax is easy and powerful and will be omnipresent in Drupal (but of course in the Drupal way so it degrades gracefully). The fact that Alex Russell of Dojo was able to hack a quick demo in 2 hours shows the extreme developer friendliness of Drupal. What's in it for users? Quicker, richer, more responsive user interfaces that are still cross browser and cross platform.
- Lynn Siprelle's training for people using Civic Space sites rocked. We need training not only for users and admins but also for developers and documenters.
Call me a "new ager" or dreamer, but I love the way we ran the Drupal online community BOF at OSCON on Thursday August 4th. We all sat in a circle and had a conversation with everybody not just a few loud people (speaking only for myself and Boris!)! Here some impressions from the Drupal online community and citizen journalism BOF at OSCON:
- Why has Drupal succeeded for online communities where Plone, Mambo and Java based solutions have not? Why are PlanetCocoon, BlufftonToday, Urban Vancouver, Bayosphere, Ourmedia, etc. using Drupal and not something else? I think it can be boiled down to these things:
- Drupal is community friendly out of the box, i.e. it has community features like blogs, forums and RSS in and out without writing code
- Drupal is developer friendly so if out of the box it's not quite what you want, you can get a developer to tweak it to your needs easily and inexpensively
- No other system has this combination of features. If they did, people would use them
- The Dean Campaign, and Civic Space (and to a much smaller extent Bryght) have done an excellent awareness and public marketing campaign for Drupal.
- Again we still have ways to go. e,g, Drupal could be more right to left friendly. Is there an Arabic version (Jean Michel of the UN wanted this)?
- How about serving up static content from stuff in text files? For some strange reason, people want to do this :-) !?!
- Again, the community needs more entry points and needs to document entry points into the Drupal ecosystem
Comments
There is a start of an
There is a start of an Arabic translation and there are Arabic Drupal sites.
http://eglug.org/
for example
[edit]
And there used to be a patch for flat file cache about three years ago.
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cool, thanks killes, i will let Jean-Michel know
n/t
thanks!!! I've read it already
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Alternatives for Arabic
Right to left is an issue with Arabic (and Hebrew, Amharic [the language of Ethiopia], Syriac, and a few dead languages, such as Aramaic, and others).
A long time ago there was a discussion on Arabic and Drupal, and if a site is purly Arabic, CSS can be the answer in some cases.
Some Hebrew sites have successfully implemented a right-to-left only web site in Drupal.
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Look at all the Powerbooks!
..I want a Powerbook. The mobility is something I miss with my iMac G5.
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Have a great day™
there ought te be
a drupal powerbook. just the logo of drupal on the lit of the notebook. would make a great price!
photoshop anyone?
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well then
I ask for one of these. ... waiting recievement.
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Quoting:I learned that it's
Quoting:
I learned that it's all about the people. Drupal has awesome technology but the biggest challenge going forward in my opinion is harnessing that technology to meet people's needs and making people aware of how they can use that technology.
I agree with that.
I am new to Drupal and instead of a hardcore insider I'm a curious outsider looking if Drupal could do something for me. And I must be harsh: Drupal does not appear to be usable. The reason why is that when I go to the website of Drupal, I don't see clearly what it is about, thus I leave it alone.
I am a member of the board of a student organization (Erasmus Student Network) with over 25000 registered members this year, (though we estimate we reach about 60000 students for the moment).
To run a local student organization requires a lot of practical knowledge. Therefore we need proper knowledge management and this can only be achieved by having the appropriate online tools, since we are a geographically dispersed organization.
In this perspective we could use Drupal if we would understand it, though my experience from direct contact with students is that Drupal lacks the initial simplicity for drawing the attention of people.
Therefore we are obliged to start working on our own simple solution at http://www.the-human-network.org
It would please us if we could use any of your solutions. Because we don't see how, we don't use your solution for the moment. However feel invited to contact me at esn.networker@gmail.com if you think we could mean something for each other.
Kind regards,
Toon Macharis
Network Administrator ESN International
esn.networker@gmail.com
http://www.esn.org
what?
Now see, you said all that without anything actually being said.
There is nothing in this sentence that suggests you did your homework or bothered to invest any time in learning anything. Your account is five hours old and you have one post, this one. Perhaps if you could post in the correct forum provided what you are trying to accomplish, then people might be able to provide useful feedback.
We have a group working on usability, but you don't actually say that usability is your problem. You merely say that Drupal is not usable, your feedback is useless, imprecise and confusing.
In short, your feedback does not appear to be usable. I read your post and don't clearly see what it is about so I leave it alone. Your link to a 'coming soon' site is clearly spam (as there is no useful information there, merely you using Drupal.org to drive hits to your site).
Perhaps instead of starting yet another initative, you could join the current ones here. Kieran Lal of CivicSpace is working on various usability initives. Others are wroking on updating the documentation. Perhaps you could join resources and solve this together, leveraging the power and maturity of an existing project rather then re-inventing the wheel.
-sp
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-Steven Peck
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Indeed
Dear sepeck,
I may not have used the right words for you to see I don't want to fight rather solve an issue.
First and for all, let's not fight, that's only a waste of time and energy.
It is true that I have not spent much time researching Drupal, but then why should I?
I have a lot of experience in direct contact with students and how they act. And I know that if you want to offer something to them it has to be very simple and clear. They have to understand from the onset why they need your service, otherwise you don't make a chance.
I come to the website Drupal, because I have heard rumours it is great. I honestly believe there is something in it. Though I don't see it and that is a problem for you to be accepted and appreciated by a lot of people.
I only have spent a couple of hours of research on Drupal, which is not much, but don't be mistaken, normal users don't give you 15 minutes.
And that's the message I would want to give you: make a presentation of Drupal so people know in 15 minutes what you offer them. You have "About Drupal" and "Screenshots" and "Features" and "Demo" visible on your front page, which is a good start, but if you click on any of them a lot of people get lost. There is too much information in my opinion.
What would be great is that there would be a 10 step wizard, where every step shortly describes an aspect of Drupal and all people have to do is just click to go to the next page and in the end they know what Drupal is about.
Whatever you don't need to listen me. Also you don't have to help me find out what Drupal is about. However, it would be great if we could help each other.
And the project we are setting up is not about creating Content Management Systems. Instead it is about representing communities and their needs. And these communities need Content Management Systems. Though as we don't have much time to investigate a Content Management System as Drupal, since time is a limited resource, we will be forced to design an own simple solution.
I am at your disposal for any comment at my email.
Toon Macharis
ESN International Network Administrator
esn.networker@gmail.com
It is true that I have not
There are (many) people here, who will simply not try to help you if they know exactly that you didn't search, read and try to fix the problem yourself before asking. Everyone here has a limited amount of time only, most won't bother to do your homework for you.
Does that translate to "we will write our own CMS"? That's a very bad idea if you want to save time.
Uwe.
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conversations...
First off, we're not fighting. We never have been. Why do people want to allege this when replying? I outlined in my post my concerns about your thoughts. I provided a link to the appropriate forum for 'Is drupal appropriate for me' question.
Your message read that Drupal was to complicated and you were going to develop your own solution. I asked some other people to read it to see if I read it wrong. They also evidently read it wrong as well.
Normal users do not deploy complex CMS backed websites either :) so that's actually fine. You can, but you have to be willing to spend more than 15 minutes, so developers, site admins, and power users. Anyone can do this, but it;s not Front Page. They should look to CivicSpace or other venders for that level of sales.
I do expect that developers who are implementing complex sites will spend some time evaluating a solution to see if it meets their needs. This is a database driven content managment system designed to foster online communities that can be used for a variety of other purposes. So yes, I expect you to spend more than 15 minutes researching it. In any case I direct your attention to the handbook where the first link is Is Drupal right for you.
Drupal is a little more complex and there could be a number of 15 minute presentation. I don't sell support and services so who would make them? Who will donate their work, their time, their effort to develop and add these presentations that their competitors could use? Anyone can add a page to the handbook. It is moderated for approval. All the content we currently have was donated.
As to what Drupal offers people.... well, Drupal offers what you put into it. If you want to setup a portal for your students, then you must design and market your site for them to use. Ideally, they don't need to know that the backend is Drupal. That is for you to know. You have to decide how you would design your site. Drupal offers you the backend framework for you to more easily develop your own site. Out of the box you can build a very useful site in a reasonably short time.
If you go with Drupal, then great, we need more usability experts. I suggested you contact Kieran Lal to work with him on this as he is coordinating our efforts here.
We are listening. Open Source is about participation. My reply was about how yours was not clear. I tried to give you links to areas to ask more questions and a contact point to help address usability concerns. You link came across as 'Drupal won't work for us so we are writing our own'. Then the link was to a 'coming soon' page which as I actually followed it to gather more information to see if I could address your concerns was really irritating. I spent time to try and help address your concenrs and was unable to with the information you provided.
Stick around, get a hold of Kerien, play with it a bit more. Try the #drupal-support irc channel, ask more quesitons in the forums (We even have a usability forum). Our volunteers will hopefully not miss your posts and be able to answer them.
-sp
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Drupal will give you
exactly what you put into it.
As you briefly described your project, it sounds like you are working (at least to some extent) within an educational community.As a professional educator who both works in the classroom and designs solutions for education, I appreciate the open ended flexibility of Drupal. Drupal allows you to shape the precise solution for your need.
RE:
I challenge ANYBODY to fully capture the scope of what Drupal can do in a series of explanatory wizards. This seems to be a reductionistic approach (ie, Drupal fits in this box) as opposed to an open ended, informed understanding of what Drupal offers.
Drupal can do many things, and it is particularly strong at building and supporting communities. I don't think it is the job of the core developers to condense their knowledge into something that can be understood by a user who will only devote 15 minutes to researching a CMS. There aren't many jobs that can be done right in only 15 minutes.
With Drupal, we have been provided a tool that rivals/exceeds similar tools available-- some of these tools are open source, where others are commercial products that cost hundreds/thousands of dollars. This tool has been created by people who have donated their time and talent. In short, the quality of their work warrants gratitude, and deserves informed, constructive feedback.
Drupal can save you time. But, to use Drupal to its full capacity, you will need to spend some time learning how it works.
I wish you luck on your project.
Cheers,
bonobo
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I always thought that study
I always thought that study also implies research.
You don't have done any to speak of.
And if you think we care whether you use Drupal or not: We don't.
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Kristof to the rescue
For all of you Drupalers that have grown passionate and are a bit of baffled by Toon's message, please don't take it as an insult. I guess the reason why we Drupal people (I'm still rather fresh but I'm hooked) are reacting this passionate is cause user friendlyness is a sensitive point in Drupal. But if you are honoust you have to admit that your first encounter with blue marine drupal was kind of a challenge.
I do admit that Toon could have been a bit less direct in his communication, but from experience I know that he has his own different way of looking at and talking about things. And although his comments might sound strange in the beginning, I have learned to appreciate his insights as they always approach problems from a very different angle and have proven to me to be valuable once you start digging a bit deeper ;)
To solve the issue at hand, I know Toon from ESN so I'll give him an intro to Drupal after which I'm sure he'll prove to be a good recruit.
PS: is there any (decent) way to move discussions (like this one) to another forum?
a Belgian in Hungary
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We actually dealt with it
We actually dealt with it fine. There was no fight, no issue, it really was a discussion. No one is mad at or with anyone.
Best to start a New usability thread instead of one started a year ago. I would however suggest holding off on that until you install Drupal 4.8/5.0 and look through the dev discussions mail list. Recent conversations revolve somewhat around UI, etc. Things will be a bit different.
As this is old, etc.... I am going to lock this thread to new comments. hit my contact link if you think a year old discussion should be left open.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide