Our new site design is live, so if you're reading this in a feed reader, please click on through! In a nutshell, we wanted to redesign to take advantage of Drupal 7, HTML5, and dramatically improve the readability and usability of the site as a whole.

Is there a feature list and competition analysis Drupal or non Drupal intranet usable out of box ?
The main supects (for me) would be :

Build on top of Drupal http://commons.acquia.com & http://openatrium.com
In OpenSource http://buddypress.org/
In MS http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/
In Saas http://www.jivesoftware.com/ for business and http://ning.com for general public

If not already the case we can try to do that together...

We have quite some material in previous discutions
http://groups.drupal.org/node/53268
http://groups.drupal.org/node/45468
On top of my head, I rember among other participation about packaging from OpenPublish's guys
and users stories setup by brightlemon http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=6c99

I Cross posted to have the feedback of the user and decision maker that are testing the two Drupal solutions.
- http://commons.acquia.com/discussion/there-feature-list-and-comparaison-...
- https://community.openatrium.com/documentation-en/node/2311

There is a similar disction in BuddyPress's website http://buddypress.org/community/groups/drupal-commons-vs-buddypress
and in ning http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/alternatives-1

OpenPublish

Start:  2010-09-07 02:00 - 03:00 America/Montreal User group meeting Organizers:  brandonojc

Join the #drupal-accessibility IRC Group now and meet with us on Tuesday, September 7th.

We'll review our progress on the #D7AX pledge, announce what is up for DrupalCon-Copenhagen, talk about our commits and the work that remains to be done for Drupal 7, and then develop our plans for Drupal 8.

For the latest agenda, read the full version of this item. To add an item to this agenda, either comment below or contact one of our group organizers — Cliff, mgifford, or brandonojc.

If you missed August's meeting, read the logs to find out what we got done then.

1. Agenda Review
2. #D7AX pledge progress
3. DrupalCon CPH
4. Drupal 7 accessibility items:
• Committed:
• Contrast between error and link colour causes death to eyeballs
• Remaining:
• Drag/Drop Accessibility Best Practice Documentation
• Overlay
• Shortcut "Edit shortcuts" link has insufficient color contrast ratio
• Documenting table drag best practices
• Table Drag Improvement Patch
5. Drupal 8 approaches and collaboration:
• How do we effectively engage the other core developers?
• How do we map out a more consistent Form API structure for handling fieldsets?
• Full support for WAI-ARIA in core
6. Schedule Next Meeting

Usability

I've since started designing a variant of views that's specific to DrupalGardens, but thought some of you might like to see the concepts I came up with for the non DrupalGardens version of Views..

AttachmentSize 01_List_of_views.png40.45 KB 02_Basics.png49.73 KB 03_B_Start.png74.02 KB 04_Drag_filter_node_type.png75.07 KB 05_configure_node_type.png95.42 KB 06_updated_node_type.png77.69 KB 07_Drag_Node_publlished.png79.88 KB 08_configure_node_pullished.png86.65 KB 09_Result_node_published.png81.02 KB 10_Fields_start.png76.89 KB 11_Drag_Node_title.png77.83 KB 12_Configure_Node_title.png96.58 KB 13_Result_Node_title.png73.96 KB 14_Duplicate_state_-_name_state.png64.19 KB 15_Duplicate_state.png75.78 KB 16_Query_Duplicated.png77.06 KB 17_Presentation_start.png102.74 KB 18_presentation_result_drag_page.png123.67 KB 19_presentation_conigure_page.png131.94 KB Usability

@royscholten @useradvocate and I will likely make a video to capture them all. It starts with the first thing you see in install.php #d7ux

@becircle ooh, what nits did you pick out of Drupal 7 UI? UX-team wants to know :) #d7ux

@cltux @schaedelio Drupal 7 = almost there. http://ow.ly/2i3bo for #d7ux recap. @markboulton @leisa did great. The work is never finished :)

@schaedelio Though I haven't seen anything new come along in about a year. Maybe they finished? cc: @drupalredesign #d7ux

@schaedelio The UX fro Drupal was looking pretty promising. @markboulton was doing some hefty UX stuff for it http://www.d7ux.org/ #d7ux

I just wanted a list of usability resources so thought I'd put the ones I knew about into a wiki & encourage others to expand it.

Associations

Usability Association & Approaches to user centered design:

• http://www.upassoc.org/
• http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/about_usability/what_is_ucd.html
• http://www.openusability.org/

General Usability Links

• A List Apart
• Usability Matters
• Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability

Usability & Free Software

• Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it
• Usability and Open Source Software
• The Usability of Open Source Software
• Why Free Software usability tends to suck

Drupal Usability Blogs

• @Yoroy's blog - http://www.yoroy.com/
• @Bojhan's blog - http://www.bojhan.nl/
• http://www.d7ux.org/

Notable Drupal Usability discussions

• Personal Thoughts On Learning Usability And Usability Resources

Books

• Strategies for Improving Open Source Software Usability: An Exploratory Learning Framework and a Web-based Inspection Tool

See also:

• Moodle Usability FAQ

Usability

The http://drupal.org/project/author_select module is up which transforms the autocomplete Authored By field to an HTML <select> widget (which seems to be much easier for clients to get a handle on).

I'd love it if you guys could try it out on a couple sites and let me know if you have any problems. It's really simple, but has made life a lot easier for a couple of our clients.

Usability

I'm gonna use comments to post seperate screens so they can be commented on individually and because I like seeing my own picture so much…

• Tried to start from scratch and only add the things needed to get up and running.
• Using D7 core patterns as much as possible. Combining, extending, abusing where needed.
• Not to forget how much we can win by rewriting form field labels and descriptions: http://skitch.com/yoroy/dg8ii/copy

I didn't really deep-dive into round 1: http://groups.drupal.org/node/64143 so if there are parallels, maybe those are the likely better ideas :)

Usability

M.C. Dean, Inc. is looking to contract a user interface/experience engineer for a corporate web redesign project, with the potential to add further projects within a greater corporate web development program.

We're ideally looking to develop a long-term relationship, involving continuing work to potentially include thin client web applications.

The requirements for the initial contract involve working with our team to produce a UI and Drupal theme for our new corporate web site; you will deliver a UI design and will deliver a theme, to include base design and design integration for deployed Drupal modules.

Qualified candidates will have demonstrable experience theming the Drupal CMS for organizations with deep corporate structures. Candidates will have experience working within existing and evolving brand guides, and can demonstrate competency in HTML, CSS, PHP, and AJAX. Preference will be given to candidates who can demonstrate competency as well with a set of web application languages including jS, jQuery, Flex, Flash, etc.

Please provide a response with qualifications and general schedule availability from Aug-Dec 2010. Provide your response in a standard document format.

read more

Does Drupal really have a steep learning curve? If you read the usual CMS comparison posts around the web that seems to be the general consensus. But I don't believe that is entirely fair and, as most things, it is all about relativity - how steep the mountain is depends on what is at the top of the mountain once you get there.

Most discussions regarding the relative merits of various content management systems end up presenting Drupal as a potentially powerful system but with a steep learning curve. People blame the weird terminology Drupal uses and a user interface that is not immediately intuitive. Terms like nodes and taxonomy don't directly relate to actual things likes pages and categories and once you install it is not clear what you are supposed to do next.

read more

..."The future in D7 and beyond is file (field)
along with PHP stream wrappers and other niceties. Media module makes
use of these features already.

We perhaps need a new discussion on groups.drupal.org, to analyze and
figure out what kind of functionality projects like Audio and Video
should provide, if any, starting from D7.

posted by sun on http://drupal.org/node/47998#comment-3139718

We've reached an important milestone with file field improvements in Drupal. Will the Media module be a good replacement for these other modules? Are there any use cases that warrant keeping independent audio/video modules - perhaps providing additional display options, metadata, etc?

Media

If you're building a large website in Drupal, you're likely to have a long list of views that you're using. Often, views require some custom configuration to match a given design or to provide the user with additional information. Sometimes you want to add dynamic text above or below the view, such as the number of results, or want to create a dynamic title beyond what views lets you configure through the user interface.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to chat to Eric Ries about Startup Lessons Learned. Eric talks a lot about quick product launches and rapid iteration. He's coined the term: Minimum Viable Product. It is roughly defined as the least amount of work that you can do to make a product that you can test with your market. Small businesses need to test their business ideas first and foremost. Yes you need to care about SEO, usability and architecture and sales funnels. But if you've got two pages and a PayPal "buy now" button you've got enough to launch your idea. (Eric tells a great story about how their team sweated blood to get their product ready. They put the Web site together and no one clicked the link to download. Weeks earlier they could have put up a broken link and learned the same lesson and saved hundreds of hours of time.)

read more

The combination of Mailhandler and MIME Router allows you to set up your site to take posts via email, and to route attachments into filefields.

MIME Router integrates cleanly with Filefield, Imagefield and SWF Tools. File paths can be set via the Token module. To use MIME Router, just upload it into your modules directory and enable it; the module uses the allowed filetypes in Filefield's user interface. Aside from adding fields to your content types, no additional config is needed to use MIME Router.

read more

#d4dboston Bohjan Somers talking #d7ux http://twitpic.com/1yh6tc

as expected it was a #wordpress site that got #hacked http://ping.fm/jR3gL #d7ux - #happy it's not #drupal