drupal

It’s been just over a year since I rolled out the current design of Pixels and Widgets and for the past four weeks, I’ve been itching to tear it down and start all over again.

I guess the question that occurs to me is: Why redesign a site that you barely update?

UPDATED: I added some further thoughts on why I think MB Design is being really brave

Mark Boulton and his team are the bravest designers I (don’t) know

Designers all know that design by committee doesn’t work. However, can design by community succeed?

I am often overwhelmed with feelings of bitterness when I think about Drupal. My wife thinks it is cute that I am so passionate about a platform.

Frequently, I tag entries referring to Drupal on my web journal with “suckage“. It’s horrible, but the sense of frustration I’ve had with Drupal is greater than I have ever had with any other FLOSS CMS. That being said, there are some things that are really just awesome.

Consequently, I’d like to talk about some great things I have found working with Drupal.

Getting as far as I have using Drupal has been a pretty tough haul.

I realise that with any system there will always be challenges and new things to learn. The “Drupal Way” is very different from the “Tao of Textpattern”. Even today, I struggle to get the underlying concepts for how things are done in Drupal.

I’ve taken the last week and a half exploring Drupal. Some people say it’s the Cat’s Meow, but I say that it still needs a lot of work.

Some thoughts on using it:

I don’t intend for this to be trolling, but I was googling the term “Drupal is ugly” looking for why most of the themes which are formally submitted to drupal.org are so, umm, un-inspiring.

Clearly the developers of Drupal, a leading opensource Content Management Framework, are not designers. When they have to publish a 250-page book on theming Drupal—it means it is too hard.