Comments on: Designing for the wrong target audience (or why Drupal should be a developer tool and not a consumer product)

By: bg1

bg1 — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:44:32 +0000

I want it all.

As a developer, I want a product (so I don’t have to spend my developer resources developing common functionalities and utilities. I want the basic site up and running with most community functionalities in a few hours without the need to do a lot for the overall design and appearance. I then want to turn my attention to powerful development tools that will let me develop great applications that easily tie into the Drupal user interface shell.

What does this mean: I would like to see 3 parallel development streams:
1. a small core framework that is rock solid and infinitely expandable via modules
2. packaged suites of modules that provide common functionality and utilities for targeted audiences (including modules to help build social communities, communication, content management, etc. such as blogs, forums, newsletters, comments, image management, articles, file uploads, import/export utilities, etc.)
3. development tool sets for customer development to extend the core functionality in impressive ways. These could include web service interfaces, database tools, complex data entry and validation tools, version management, test platforms, etc.

By making the core framework as small and solid as possible, a solid version should be able to be available quickly. Then different audiences can get the packages of modules either on the design, appearance and basic functionality side or on the complex development side.

By: sepeck

sepeck — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:40:51 +0000

@Bart Feenstra
Install profiles? You mean the technology that has been in Drupal since 4.7 and only just started being used? Before such a thing could happen, people and teams would need to mature to demonstrate that there are people willing to maintain broader general use profiles. These technologies would also need to mature distribution methods from drupal.org or they will die out and disappear.

It’s not just about the neat technology, it’s about the people, infrastructure and processes that will maintain those distributions going forward. There are people working to build this infrastructure but they are few in number. If you want to see this vision, get involved in the issue queue sooner then later to resolve these issues.

By: Bart Feenstra

Bart Feenstra — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:43:18 +0000

I think that installation profiles can (and perhaps should) be the bridge between Drupal as a tool and Drupal as a product. This allows developers to tweak Drupal as they see fit, while people without the skills, the time or desire to to that to still use Drupal with a click of their mouse.

Apart from radical changes there are also still a lot of things that can and definitely should be changed that do not alter how Drupal works, but that do make Drupal easier to use. Think about nodes and Taxonomy. Complicated descriptions and difficult terminology that stems from Drupal’s abstract code architecture make Drupal’s workflow unusable for a lot of potential users. We can change this, but as a lot of discussion proves, not all developers agree with such changes (see node versus content).

By: sepeck

sepeck — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:32:25 +0000

Pity this didn’t come earlier when people who tried to point out this all to narrow vision were dismissed out of hand, got fed up and took their experience elsewhere.

By: Evan Donovan

Evan Donovan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:37:16 +0000

Thanks for this, Leisa! Both your initial post & the discussing following it have been very thought-provoking. “#smallcore + distributions” seems to be the best way to get Drupal out in the wild for the largest number of people.

For example, I work as a Web developer at a nonprofit, and am also currently developing a website for my church. Both are in Drupal. But I’ve had to undo a lot of the work of the D6 admin UI to make them usable for people approximating the Verity role. yhahn’s Admin module (which is an approximation of part of the D7UX vision) has made my work a lot easier, but there was still much to be done.

I think things like Features will help us move forward to a place where the initial site builders can go through a kind of wizard-like install process to create the site platform, and then the ongoing site admins/content creators can step in. But in order for this to be possible, we should make core development focused on APIs while leaving the UI innovation to contrib. Design by committee is rarely effective.

Again, Leisa, thanks for your insight, and I appreciate you having the grace to recognize publicly some of the initial missteps of the D7UX project. I still support the vision of broadening the reach of the Drupal community, but we need to ensure that the UI work of people like merlinofchaos & sun is supported by core. If core has too many defaults that they have to override, it can only be discouraging for their future development work. Drupal 7 will still be a great release even if D7UX didn’t achieve all its initial lofty goals. But refocusing for D8 (and a roadmap?) will hopefully that release even better.

By: Daniel Schildt

Daniel Schildt — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:39:14 +0000

Thanks for writing this. There is surely need for both better UI for developers (for building and making things better) and better UI for actual users of running website (from the point of content management).

By: Albin

Albin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:54:43 +0000

very well said, THANK YOU!

By: Bojhan Somers

Bojhan Somers — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:59:46 +0000

So I am confused, I astraid from commenting on this issue especially as yoroy asked most of my question. This reply seems somewhat, diffrent then the tone of voice of your blog post – which to me seemed far more provoking.

Basicly, you purpose a distrubtion of core? Wich is friendly to a “Jeremy” ? But not core itself, core itself beign developer only?

By: Bojhan Somers

Bojhan Somers — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:57:00 +0000

No, the loudest in the room are heading that way. I think the understanding of small core, is mostly unexisting – so I am happy to see a blog post explaining it.

By: Leisa Reichelt

Leisa Reichelt — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:48:13 +0000

I think what I’m really suggesting here (and the title of the post admittedly doesn’t do me any favours) is that Drupal *core* is for developers but that the Drupal community has a great opportunity and perhaps even responsibility to look for ways to ‘package’ Drupal in a way that is a much better experience for the non-developers amongst us who would love to have much better access to, and a much better experience of a tool like Drupal.

For us to have only one part of this conversation and not the other is – I agree – a major bummer. Let’s not let all of the talk about small core and designing for developers take us away from the other challenge this position presents which is: how do we look after these other very important end users (who represent so much potential to us), and how do we create the incentive for people/companies to create these tools/experiences so that we stop talking about it and actually get to work doing it.