Jason, Dries and I recently returned from a D7UX brainstorming session in London with Mark Boulton, Leisa Reichelt and Roy Scholten.  The goal of our meeting was to further outline known issues, further progress on the d7UX designs, and leverage the combined Drupal knowledge of Roy, Dries and myself to poke holes in the existing design concepts posted on d7ux.org.  We covered a lot of ground, from installing modules, managing users, adding editing and finding content, real-time editing and even covered a bit of themeing.  It was a mind-melting two days, but we made a lot of progress.

Given the noise around editing in place, coupled by the large majority of Web site building products on the market taking advantage of this feature, we drilled in hard on this topic.  A few days before arriving in London, David Rothstein, Jason, Chris and myself had a very informative discussion on this topic. David pointed me to a post by Nate Haug, which does an awesome job at conveying the challenges of editing in place in Drupal.  In fact, we used Nate's example as the conduit to push through the challenges of this concept.  In the end, we concurred that editing in place does have boundaries, and when when crossed, we could seamlessly swap in modal dialogs.  The concept still needs to be tested, but I believe the design will settle the noise, and have huge advantages over the existing method of editing.  

Our success in arriving at a workable solution can be attributed to contributions made by the community. Without your feedback, we could have left our meeting with a design that failed to capture valid constraints. This goes to show you how important it is to get involved. As a fail-safe, Mark and Liesa, with help from Dries are forming a technical panel to ensure their ideas supplement Drupal.

By the end of our meeting,  I walked away feeling really great about Mark and Leisa's efforts.  Despite everything we threw at their concepts, they largely held up.  Of course some holes were found, but nothing that required a major overhaul.  Mostly just small stuff that required a bend here and there.

Next steps are more of the same. Mark and Leisa plan to continue to flush out and test their designs against Drupal and non-Drupal users. For myself, I'll be contributing where I can, and funneling their work to the Acquia engineers to help foster feedback and build out their designs. Lots of exciting stuff taking place. I hope your as excited as I am.

A few pictures from the session:

Editing in place

Our newest employee Jason Reed and Leisa

Roy drawing site building ideas

Mark and Roy's site building brainstrom

Enjoying a well deserved beer (it's on the way). Not sure why Jason's in the fireplace