This is the fifth blog post in a series about user experience improvements in Drupal 6. Drupal is very popular with developers who want to leverage the contributed modules to meet their feature requirements. Previous versions of the theme system have favored powerful theming through programming rather than simplicity for designers. Three significant changes to the theme system have reduced the need for designers to learn how to program to use some of the theme engines most powerful features.
This is the fourth blog post in a series looking at user experience improvements in Drupal 6. One of the principles of the Drupal project is that Drupal should have low resource demands, and "have minimal, widely-available server-side software requirements.
This is the third blog post in a series which examines the user experience improvements in Drupal 6. There are no widely accepted measures of usability, but I like to measure four attributes when testing the usability of an application. These measurements include: time on task, number of errors in task completion, goal completion, and a users qualitative assessment of the experience. In this post, I review the user experience improvements that reduce the errors it is possible to make with Drupal.
This is the second blog post in a series examining Drupal 6 core contributor user experience improvements. Improving the user experience in Drupal is one of the biggest challenges the Drupal community faces, mostly due to a competitive pressure best described as The Ockham's Razor Principle of Content Management Systems. From a contribution standpoint, the most user experience improvements come in the form of information based improvements. I further categorize information improvements as terminology, consistency, grammar, information presentation, and walls of text. Some of them are improvements in information presented during installation or updating. Others are in information that is statically presented in administration interfaces, or dynamically presented information.
We announced yesterday that Acquia has been selected as a Red Herring 100 North America winner for 2008. A cool honor - and another data point that speaks to the growing interest in Drupal and to the validation of Acquia's business model to provide commercial support for Drupal.
This is the first blog post of a series of posts that will examine the Drupal core contributors user experience (UX) improvements in Drupal 6. My intent is to help shed some light on the kind of user experience improvements the core contributors are good at and the kind they need help with. I will identify the number of contributors and the number of patches, and I will also help the community understand how we can best make further user experience improvements in Drupal 7. There are currently thousands of designers and other user experience professionals who are capable of helping improve the core but who need to be connected with the core contributors who already make these UX improvements. This blog series is a first step towards connecting UX contributors with the existing core contributors.
Thanks to everyone who voted for Acquia in the first round of Enterprise 2.0's people's choice (aka American Idol) contest for their Launchpad event. We received 80 votes in the first round and made it to Round 2. The top 4 vote getters in Round 2 will present on stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
Last week Matt Asay posted a list of ways to muscle integration partners into pulling through licenses of Alfresco's Enterprise Edition ($$$) versus just delivering solutions on the Community Edition.
This article explores the process of taking HTML content from Drupal nodes and indexing it for the purpose of search and text retrieval at a later time. The code examples apply to Drupal 6.
Acquia has been selected as a finalist in the Collaboration and Social Networking category for the 2008 MITX Technology Awards. This is the fifth year MITX has offered the awards to recognize innovative companies and technologies in the New England region across nine categories:
This is the first blog post of a series of posts that will examine the Drupal core contributors user experience (UX) improvements in Drupal 6. My intent is to help shed some light on the kind of user experience improvements the core contributors are good at and the kind they need help with. I will identify the number of contributors and the number of patches, and I will also help the community understand how we can best make further user experience improvements in Drupal 7. There are currently thousands of designers and other user experience professionals who are capable of helping improve the core but who need to be connected with the core contributors who already make these UX improvements. This blog series is a first step towards connecting UX contributors with the existing core contributors.
Acquia has been selected as a finalist in the Collaboration and Social Networking category for the