Comments on: Why is D7UX.org on WordPress (not Drupal?)

By: drupalicious

drupalicious — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:56:59 +0000

Talking Drupal on a wordpress blog ? WTF
What a disgrace to the Drupal community. This web site is a waste of my time.

By: satrap

satrap — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:19:51 +0000

Thanks for the post, i enjoyed reading it. blogging is not as easy as many think it is, it’s hardwork. any how thanks.

By: Leisa Reichelt

Leisa Reichelt — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:38:42 +0000

just on the off chance the anonymous ranter above left a valid email address to receive updated comments, i want to point out that this is only one incredibly small part of a much larger body of work, most of which now exists on d7ux.org

if you have anything constructive to bring to the project please go and inform yourself of what we’re actually doing, and get involved.

i’m really happy to engage in this conversation with you further if you want to quit the personal attacks and identify yourself.

By: and-further-more...

and-further-more... — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:05:47 +0000

I have learned couple of things about UX designers that make me wonder if I am one of them:

- we don’t need to understand the mechanics of a framework or the high-level technical constrains/opportunities. Only dumb professionals like Architects and Industrial Designers need that kind of foolish input to provide a good solution.

- the user is ALWAYS dumb; there is not such a thing like an expert user or an admin/technical role (which by the way is the role you just created!)

- since WordPress is a CMS for blogging, it is fine for me to make the assumption Drupal has the exact same purpose and expect to see a My Blog right after the installation process (who wants to use Drupal for more complex projects anyways?, what?, Onion.com?, Warner Bros?, AOL Corporate?)

The UX field is way too immature compared to other professions. Pity to see these narrow design approaches get into the Drupal community.

By: going-blind-here

going-blind-here — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:59:11 +0000

Granted: Drupal usability sucks in many places; it was targeting technical audiences for years, and you are here to help bring Drupal to other audiences (as well as to make it better for the technical ones). WordPress could be a good place to learn “what works” for SOME type of users, but expecting Drupal to produce a blog engine easily is undermining its real nature and begs the question about the quality of your design research.

Keeping you ignorant of the current state-of-affairs in Drupal does not give you perspective, just keeps you ignorant!. You can use an iterative Usability Testing technique to keep an unbiased user’s “perspective and distant” during the design validation process, but as a designer you should know what are you getting into.

For a community where many people have been volunteering lots of effort and time for years, I would expect a more empathetic and committed (regarding dog-fooding) engagement from those who are being paid for it.

By: god-help-drupal7

god-help-drupal7 — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:05:22 +0000

I guess the only thing this video shows is two jackass poser UX designers who apparently know next to nothing about web technology with it’s strange “clean urls” and who want to login to the damn mysql database so they can blog about their cats are still able, through all bias and sarcasm, to install Drupal. This is exactly why the UX part of our industry is so fucked at the moment. Thank you for the prime example. The fact these two successfully installed Drupal is a testament to the quality of the project.

One other thought for your rambling excuses on not using Drupal. How about using Drupal 6 for this site so you can actually learn about the platform you are supposedly going to improve before moving on to Drupal 7? Please don’t confuse ignorance and arrogance with “perspective and distance”. God help Drupal 7 with these goons on the scene.

By: rapsli

rapsli — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:23:15 +0000

Probably this is not the right place, but I don’t know where else to put it. Wouldn’t it be nice, if while installing there would be some dummy posts, and menu items and so on.
The user should actually be able to choose during the installation process if he wants some sample nodes, users, roles, blocks and so on set up -> maybe even a very simple site with the most important elements of a 0815 website.
I actually quite liked that on the Joomla site I installed once and it did help me a whole lot, but if you don’t need it, you wouldn’t select this option and i wouldn’t influence the flexibility.

…

By: Berdir

Berdir — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 23:23:10 +0000

Keep in mind that you installed the development version of Drupal 7. This version is in *heavy* development mode, For example, the navigation structure (Management, User stuff in Secondary Menu) was recently changed and needs to be improved. Same for some of the description texts and so on.
Apart from that, I actually think you did a pretty well job installing and trying out Drupal for the first time.

Also, Drupal is a generic CMS/CMF, not “just” a blogging platform. Creating a easy to use interface without loosing or deeply hiding all the options Drupal can and does offer is definitly not easy. For example, making it very easy to create a test post and show it on the start page would probably make it harder to do more complex stuff (which most users do more often than test posts, after all.. :) ).

But I fully agree that there is space for *many* UX improvements, nobody is denying that, I think. Actually, there are already 3 issues in the Drupal issue queue that try to improve things you pointed out in your first (just the installing part) video:
http://tinyurl.com/cyveep

I think that’s one of the greatest things about Drupal, there are so many people around willing to participate and improve Drupal whereever they can :)

By: gillettd

gillettd — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:31:44 +0000

I have to say that I’m on the WordPress/Drupal fence. If you’re setting up a school website and need something working fast and you want it to look unique, WordPress works well.

But when your needs grow and you want to do more, WordPress doesn’t provide a very flexible framework, aside from some great extensions.

I now have 3 Drupal test sites for play and I have to agree that some of the simplist tasks (adding an inline image to a post/story/event) required a lot of research. (I now see the value of “Input Types” but it took awhile.) It shouldn’t.

Drupal shouldn’t try to be a better WordPress or even aspire to become a better blogging platform. It has far greater potential. I don’t mind the steep learning curve but I would sure welcome any UI improvements.

I’ve been really impressed with the Drupal community though and they keep me going. (Lullabot, WebChick, …)

By: Pisco

Pisco — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:22:22 +0000

Beautiful, well said!