[drupal-devel] ShortStat for Drupal

[Steven Wittens]

>If its up to me, there wont be a lot of improvemnts in Core in 4.6. The reason 
>is simeple: WE need guidelines we all agree upon *above all*.
>I know talk is silver code is gold. But that is *the exact* reason drupal is 
>so messy right now: Everyone opesn his PHP editor, codes away, focussing on 
>speed, efficency and nice code. Which is good. But coders nearly always seem 
>to forget to look at themeability and useability. Simply because its not in 
>their line of interest (often)
>
I agree with the rest: guidelines are just that. In fact, I think that 
creating the HIG will be a lot of writing and not so much discussing, as 
we already have many unspoken rules about Drupal's UI which most long 
time contributors are aware of. It's only when new contributors arrive 
that they are often brought up.

A HIG will help speed up UI development, as there will less "should I 
use A, B or C?" mucking about, and more time to implement advanced, 
elegant solutions.

I also think that your current view of the average Drupal developer is a 
bit silly: most of the patches committed lately have involved at least 
some UI developments and improvements. In fact, I've noticed that aside 
from performance patches, the code structure is very rarely brought up 
in patch review, and the UI is the main discussion point.
Plus, Drupal's UI is pretty darn good if you look at its power: services 
like blogger are aimed at one thing, and they do it very well. But as 
soon as your feature set becomes flexible, you can no longer discuss 
details such as "which checkbox should go first" as there are simply too 
many permutations to keep in mind. Juggling both flexibility and 
consistency is a tough job, which we have begun to tackle.

Anecdote: I been doing some quick work on the fosdem developer room page 
on the fosdem site (they gave us a log-in). They use a CMS called 
Argon7, and trust me: the UI is lightyears behind Drupal. That is of 
course no reason to think our UI is "good enough", certainly not. But I 
think that you should realize that what is considered a bad UI today in 
Drupal would have been acceptable 2 years ago, and that is a very good 
thing. Our developers haven't gotten worse at UI design, our standards 
have simply gone up ;)..

Steven Wittens