On Mar 7, 2006, at 10:49 PM, Nick Lewis wrote:
Yesterday morning, Dries informed me of the following plans for 4.8: (quote) 1. A new default theme that is more slick. We're done with Bluemarine.
Talk to Jeff Robins and Ted Serbinksi. They are leading an effort to build next generation themes called Vancouver and Amsterdam. Glad to see you are talking to Adrian too. Please have this discussion in public on the themes list.
2. A dashboard module to replace the current main administration page (?q=admin).
As Earl indicated CivicSpace Labs has been working with David Reed to modify the the administration module to provide a better user experience for Drupal administrators. The administration module is currently included in the latest 0.8.3 release candidates of CivicSpace.
3. A reorganization of the administration pages.
We conducted a series of interviews with Drupal administrators in english and spanish. We conducted a number of live usability experiments related to new users using Drupal. We surveyed 877 Drupal/CivicSpace users and got some surprising results about how Drupal is actually used. The results are available here: http:// civicspacelabs.org/home/files/adminsurvey.html. We need people to objectively look at the data and really listen to what users have told us in this work. I am currently working with Bill Fitzgerald and Gunnar Langemark to interpret the data and design an administration interface that matches what drupal administrators actually do and how they work. The administration module, available in 4.6 and 4.7, is configurable so just like the existing menu and block system you can use configure it to your hearts content and even theme it extensively as we are currently doing for CivicSpace.
4. An install system.
CivicSpace labs has already built an install system for Drupal core, to replace the existing CivicSpace installer we have using and extending for the last 15 months. We have a learned a lot about installation, environment checking, error messages, the state of cheap hosting, and the skills levels of new users who are trying to use an installer. We have also gone out studied other CMS installers such as Word Press, and Joomla's installers. Drupal development favors small patches so we are currently breaking up the installer into at least three pieces per Neil's request and Dries's agreement. But we need help with the installer. Following Steven Wittens review we have been working to improve the error messages for users here: http://drupal.org/node/51772 The installer is fully bundled for testing of Drupal core here: http://www.kerneltrap.org/jeremy/drupal/installer/. If you want to review the installer issue you can do so here: http://drupal.org/node/ 48732 The requirement API has been broken out here: http://drupal.org/node/ 52289 and needs some testing. Any help on these projects would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Kieran