Yes, we’ll that’s exactly the reason we’re doing this project – to wrangle the out of the box Drupal user experience so that it does actually support the tasks that the journalists and editors do on a day to day basis, and that’s also why I’m spending so much time talking to them and showing them my work from it’s very early, sketchy stages. Hopefully we can craft them some very fine and customised tools that will allow them to get on with their own crafting!

thanks again for your interest and I look forward to seeing what you’ve been working on!

The problem is, that the tools they are supposed to work with almost never fit to their needs. Their relationship to their CMSes is almost always a tragical one. Let me try to explain ist with the opposite.

A friend of mine is Carpenter and he has been looking for great Saws for a long time an finaly found some japanese saws. They support the way he works with wood. And he is really happy with them.

Or myself. I am really happy with textmate and with drupal. Both support the way I work. I know exactly what I have to do, to achieve a certain goal with them. I have a feeling of controling, mastering these tools, although I’m definetly NOT a master of Textmate and Drupal.

Most Editors I’ve met don’t have this kind of feeling with the CMSes they use. Their relation to their CMS is more like mine to MS Office … you know what I mean, these “Why did it do that?” and “How on earth can I do this simple little thing?” kind of relations.

For me and Office, this is fine, because it is not my job to use MS-Office. But for Editors it’s a tradegy. It’s their job to manage content and to create great web experiences. Creating Tools, that makes them feel as Masters of their Sites, is a central challange for the whole CMS-Industry. I sure, you’re going to make some great advancements in this project and thanks to your transparency for all of us.

As soon as our own CMS Improvements are done, later this Summer, I’ll try to publish them.

Perhaps that accounts for why, so far, they have been very focussed on just getting the simple tasks to be simple, and not getting too carried away with the bells and whistles and things that we could do. Stay tuned to say ‘I told you so’ later in the project tho’!

Everyone at The Economist is really very interested in sharing back as much as possible with the Drupal community, whether in the form of code/modules (as is more traditional) or in more unusual ways (as we’re doing here!)

But yes, it is a different world when everyone is getting paid to do the work

Of course, there are bad CMSes and there are even worse CMSes and a few great ones. But my experience is, that editors – by some kinde of principle – always tend to work against the limitations of a CMS. I’m sure, they do not do it no purpose. They somehow have a talent for finding the limits.

And as soon, as you try to make your CMS more powerfull, to allow the editors to go beyond the limitation, it becomes more complex.

I was really shocked, when I read, that Mercedes Bunz said, that she thinks, that the biggest challange Online Editors face, are their CMSes. They seem to her as “strenuously hand crafted baroque works of art“.

I still have no clue, wether this problem can be solved at all. But I am very curious about your aproaches, and I think that it’s a great stept forward for online journalism to make the progress as transparent as you do here. Thanks a lot.

Besides, inline editing doesn’t take any core hacking. I imagine the only “daunting” thing about doing it for #D7UX is that, in that case, people are working for free in their spare time. The world’s a different place when people pay you to do the work, isn’t it?