Drupal-user: a new list for improving the Drupal user experience
cel4145 - June 12, 2003 - 14:25
Dries has approved a new Drupal mail list to be used for working on ways to improve the Drupal user experience. As his email to the Drupal-develop list explains:
Everything that has to do with "user experience" is considered relevant, including (but not limited to) usability, documentation, and localization. . . . The drupal-user mailing list will be less technical and offers a home for non-programmers willing to contribute to Drupal development.
Note that support questions should still go to the Drupal-support list.
To subscribe, visit the mailman page for drupal-user.
Eat Own Dog Food?
Out of curiousity - why are mailing lists used instead of Drupal forums? Isn't communication and collaboration the purpose of mailing lists? Isn't this a big feature of Drupal?
push vs. pull
Mailing lists are a push medium (SMTP e-mail).
Fora are a pull medium (HTTP GET requests).
Keeping on top of discussions, catching up, etc. is easier with a push medium. Of course, you could use the notify/listhandler modules to unify mailing lists and fora. But I'd still use the mailing list interface, as Mozilla mail has much better/quicker support for threading, sorting, searching, spell-checking, private correspondance, quoting options, etc. All this is difficult to achieve with a web interface.
User experience vs. technical considerations
I think that in terms of increasing the user experience and Drupal's core strenghts, the main arguments for or against what could be improving the product in this respect, should not be technical.
Difficult or (too close too) impossible? Desireable or not - from a user experience point of view?
I think that if Drupal had decent mailing list management fuctionality "on top of" the forums, based on the same database/archive, it would certainly add to the usefulness of the product, and give it an extra edge.
email notification
One possible functionality for Drupal could be enabling a user to receive email notifications of specific topic and/or thread updates (as defined by the user).
Subscribable threads
It's called subscribing to a thread or forum, and please do add your request for email notification to this feature request.
Email replies
Should handle email replies so that the reply is posted on the right level/thread of the discussion. This, however, may pose a challenge: if the notifications are in the shape of a digest, many users will reply with the whole notification email included, which is not desireable.
yep
Drupal does not eat its own dog food. Unfortunate.
push and pull?
Why not have these features (plus email notification for a user specified thread) as Drupal forum features?
because...
Because the web isn't as good at being an application as a real application is. We have these features existing in mail clients. You can pick which one you like to do the job best. Why reinvent the wheel?
The Drupal Wheel
Maybe Drupal can make a better wheel? Instead of having separate discussions and applications (drupal site + mailing lists), I could see the advantage of having a centralized area for discussions (drupal). This is seen by looking at the duplication of topics on the mailing lists vs. the Drupal site. Also, many discussions on the mailing lists are insightful and could be beneficial if known to others on the Drupal site, and vice versa. All of this could be solved by centralizing.
lsthandler.module
the listhandler.module on Contrib repository aims to centralize as you describe. it is a work in progress. interested developers are welcome to make it better.
Newsgroups?
The mailing lists would be much nicer if they were mirrored on gmane.
you should probably
ask this the drupal-devel-owner. seems to be a popular feature request.
Getting with the program
Drupal is great, but its user friendliness is pretty weak. Witness the exchange about email vs. forum below. Mailing lists are out, forums are in, for most users. Who feels like wading through all that garbage in your inbox everyday? That's why people like forums: they're searchable, and webbased.
I recently set up a site for a little community and was hawking drupal, but the consesus of my powerusers was: the forums suck. As a result we ended up going with Invision (which has its drawbacks for me as webmonkey).
Documentation is also a big issue. Try searching this site trying to figure out how to get RSS feeds to work (something that is almost completely automatic in most CMSs these days). The cron job instructions are almost impossible to understand even if you know what you're doing. And how many people have shell access?
Release notes? The release candidate has no readme or any other file that will enlighten the unenlightened. How about trying to figure out which version you've got installed? These things can't be that hard to do if one wants to improve user experience.
Well, you asked.
new person
Hello, I have been trying to learn more about CMS. I came across an article on drupal. Can anyone recommend the best way to learn fast about CMS in general and drupal in particular? Thank you.
Problems subscribing
The mailman page for drupal-user mailing list is not working correctly. I've added my email and didn't receive any mail.
drupal-user mailing list disabled ?
Anyone knows why the drupal-user list has been disabled ? Performances problems ?
It would be interesting to reactive it, I prefer a mailing list to discuss with people, instead of a threaded forum
There wasn't much traffic on
There wasn't much traffic on the list.
--
If you have troubles with a particular contrib project, please consider to file a support request. Thanks.
ok, but as I'm a new user of
ok, but as I'm a new user of Drupal, I will have some questions to ask, and I don't want to bother people of drupal-devel mailing list.
Forums are not user friendly as you have to watch about replies frequently
As Drupal has been getting more and more popular since 4.5, I guess this user ML could be reactivated. What's your opinion ?
There is the drupal-support M
There is the drupal-support ML. http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-support
--
If you have troubles with a particular contrib project, please consider to file a support request. Thanks.