Millwood Online

In a few weeks I will be starting work for Mark Boulton Design, who are currently working on the usability of Drupal. I will be working on many web development projects in Drupal and other frameworks, but hope I can get some input into Drupal's usability.

At Drupacon last week there was a lot of talk about the state of Drupal, the usability and where it is going. Drupal 7 is still in development, but already has some great new features and bug fixes, such as the new database layer and more of CCK in core.

To get an idea of what everyone else is doing I thought I would have a look at Wordpress and Joomla. These are Drupal's biggest competition, but they have a few good ideas that could be added to Drupal.

Joomla and Wordpress are both offered in .zip format, this format is widely used on Window systems and would be a lot more familiar for some users. Maybe Drupal should offer a .zip version?

When I first installed Wordpress I was faced with the screen below. At first it looked like a Safari error screen, but on closer inspection it was a Wordpress error screen just without any branding, which isn't really an error, just the first step of the installation. We'll have to make sure Drupal doesn't make this mistake.

One thing I did like about Wordpress is the dashboard (shown below). It allows a site admin to quickly and easily see many aspects of the site in blocks, these blocks can be moved around and positioned where the user wants them. The menu and structure are well laid out and easy to understand. This is just what Drupal needs.

Joomla also has a dashboard (shown below), but it's not quite as good as Wordpress's, but still some things Drupal could learn from.