Drupal

I just upgraded this blog site to Drupal 5.0 beta. Working great so far, very easy to upgrade, love the new admin screen (which I contributed to 0.001% of the design of - I reviewed it for Dries and said "great job!").

I am typically many Drupal versions behind - the code that this is replacing was installed in 2005 and not really upgraded. So for the first time I am "leading edge."

The upgrade is also part of a move to a new hosting service and cleaning up my user-experience.org site. More content migration coming.

This weekend is a usability sprint with several open source projects in Mountain View. This is the third time they have put usability people and open source developers in the same room to collaborate. It does appear to be a movement.

Drupal is one of the projects participating. Kieran is doing remote usability testing this weekend. Another goal is to "explore how to recruit User Experience professionals to the Drupal project". I'd suggest doing the next sprint in June in Austin if you really want a lot of usability professionals to show up.

Also, Hyperscope is another open source project that is at the sprint.

I have been using Drupal for over 3 years now - this site is built with it, we built the World Usability Day 2005 site with CivicSpace (which is based on it). I used it for the Computer Science HCI class I co-taught in the spring. And so on. I have also used it a few times on "concept sites" - in a weekend I can install, set-up and populate a mini-site to show a concept (I take the concept site down later). Drupal is an awesome piece of software.

The buzz now (at drupal.org and digg.com) is the first part of an IBM developerWorks series Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site by Alister Lewis-Bowen, Stephen Evanchik and Louis Weitzman (all senior software engineers in IBM's Internet Technology Group). The article causing the excitement:

• Part 1: Introduction and overview: Why they chose Drupal

Part 2: Design for an effective user experience is about the design process for this fictitious web site. More articles specific to Drupal are coming up next in the series.

So hurrah for Drupal - this is yet another high-profile example where Drupal was chosen over its competitors. To be precise, however - "IBM" did not choose Drupal, just 3 guys in our Internet Technology Group chose Drupal. That does make at least 4 IBMers who like Drupal, and I am sure the numbers will keep growing.

If any IBMers who are interested in Drupal make it this far in my blog entry, they are welcome to join me in a Drupal group I just created for IBMers.

I am starting a new site. Using Drupal.

New: blog (I have been blogging sporadically on other sites until now).

Old: Content from user-experience.org, uuslash.org and other scattered stuff, all to be mooshed ("mooshed" is a technical IA term!) into this one new site. And yes, some form of usableweb.com will eventually make its way here.

Still very much a work-in-progress, as you can see.

Over time, I will add more current blog entries. On occassion I will also "back blog" - create an entry dated in the past and written as if I had posted it long ago. So if you see an entry older than this one, it is probably a back blog.