On Nov 10, 2007 2:12 PM, Dries Buytaert <dries.buytaert@gmail.com> wrote:
This review is quite complete, but it's a 'blogger' review, not a cms.. all the comments are "blog" oriented, and in somehow.. i's far
Thanks for saying that. It is exactly how I felt about it, too.
- A lot of people come to Drupal from a blogging background.
- A lot of what Chris said is valid for non-blogging contexts.
Drupal 6 is what will be used in 2008 and possibly part of 2009. A *lot* of people will bump in exactly the issues that Chris highlighted. Let's not classify this feedback as irrelevant -- it's some of the most valuable usability feedback we've had in months.
If people with a different background provide us feedback, we should also take that into account.
I agreed with Chris on most of his points and am amazed at how important some of them are while requiring very little work. Even the changes where I disagreed with his point of view (and there were few) are examples of situations that deserve more attention. For example, he said about taxonomies "Okay, a term is clearly a category... but this is not clear from the labeling." Well, no - Categories contain Terms. But our use of Category/Vocabulary/Taxonomy to mean the container and Term/Tag for the specific label within the container really makes this confusing. His confusion here is a natural reaction and rather than ignoring it we should improve our consistent use of the right terms to prevent confusion. One topic that I'd like to discuss more is his point about the comment settings being a per content type option (search for the string OMGWTFBBQ). I, frankly, love this flexibility in Drupal6. However, I agree with him that the UI is overly complex. We really have to balance complexity of the interface with the desire to add features and flexibility. One thing I've been thinking about is how Firefox balances these two items. There are hundreds (thousands?) of settings in firefox (type about:config into your location bar to see many of them). You only see ~10% of them in the menu structure and dialog boxes while the rest are hidden in about:config or via files (e.g. changing your chrome/*css). most Firefox users will never use about:config or the chrome files. But for the 5% who use them, they are very important! Can and should we adopt this separation in Drupal? We already have some examples of variables which have no UI in core but can be enabled via a contributed module or via settings.php (e.g. dev_query). Should we take this further as a general system? I'm leaning towards yes, but want to know how other people feel. Greg -- Greg Knaddison Denver, CO | http://knaddison.com World Spanish Tour | http://wanderlusting.org/user/greg