Posted on December 8, 2008 in News, Drupal CMS

Drupal.org is the main home of the Drupal CMS system that we use when our clients require a CMS solution. It's also what powers this website.

I chose to work with Drupal because it's highly extensible and flexible, it's powerful enough to do a lot of things and easy enough to customise for the tasks that are a little trickier. It also has a great theme system available so that we can customise brand-new themes for it for clients.

However, Drupal has had in the past a bit of a reputation as the 'Geek's CMS' - meaning that it needed someone (like us) to take the core installation and create your site for you with a good theme and an interface that makes it easy for you as the client to do what you want.

Sometimes clients ask me 'Is there an online manual I can read' or 'Is there somewhere I can go to learn a bit more about Drupal?' and I have always hesitated to point them to drupal.org. The information is there but it's often hard to find or hard to understand, and the whole site tends to looks very plain and, well, plain unnattractive. For clients with a low technology threshold it often produces more questions and problems.

The drupal.org redesign that is currently in progress will address both of my main concerns by focussing on usability - especially for beginners - and style.

The redesign process itself is also incredibly interesting to watch, it's not often you get to see inside a design of this scope and watch as it's working through and developing. I've been intrigued to see the design updates as feedback is recieved and usability concerns are ironed out.

drupal.org old site      . . .      proposed new site

It's a bit hard to see in these thumbnail because it's not just visually changing but the whole information layout and architecture is being rearranged to make it easier and friendlier to use. There is much more focus on search and making things easier for those who haven't used Drupal before.

The new site excites me because the latest designs look fantastic and I'm going to be proud to point clients there in the future, confident that they'll find what they need and be impressed by the product as they do it.

If you want to see where we're up to at the moment, check out this detailed post that shows where we are currently and some of the progression to get there. The latest iteration 11 screenshots are available here.