Drupal's usability team has organized a User Experience (UX) sprint this weekend (June 27 and 28) in Utrecht, The Netherlands. A who's-who list of user experience experts, core developers, and front-end designers will be present in person at the sprint.

If you're not in the vicinity of Utrecht, fear not! There will be a virtual code sprint this weekend over IRC as well. Join #drupal and #drupal-usability on irc.freenode.net. Come and put your coding and reviewing chops to good use on important issues that were identified during testing. Check out http://sprint.drupalusability.org/ for specific areas of focus, rated by difficulty.

We only have about 10 weeks left until Drupal 7 code freeze (September 1), so we need everyone's help! Drop on by, and have some fun! :D

Open Source Business Resource (OSBR), a free monthly online journal aimed at business owners, company executives and employees, and participants in the open source community, just published an issue centered around Women in Open Source. The issue was entirely written and edited by women, and contains lots of interesting content that ranges from highlighting work of women contributors, to examining the question of why there aren't more women in open source, to women talking about their experiences in their projects and cool stuff they're doing.

For my part, I wrote an article in the issue called Lessons on Community Management from the Open Source World that basically describes some of my own observations on what makes successful open source projects such as Drupal work. The short version: "It's the community, stupid!" ;) If you've ever been mystified about what makes Drupal tick, or wanted to harness some of that frenzied energy and put it to work within your own organization, it might be worth a read for you.

I highly recommend reading through the issue, as there is lots of great content from lots of smart, awesome authors including Drupal's very own Emma Jane Hobgin, who has recently become a core patch reviewer! :)

Big thanks to both Dru Lavigne and Rikki Kite for putting this issue together!

On June 11 and 12, I'll be speaking at Open Web Vancouver, a community based, volunteer run event showcasing open source technologies, communities and culture.

Their speaker list includes a bunch of leading minds on open web technologies, and there looks to be a big Drupal presence. My speaking topics will be women in open source and "Drupal: Under the Hood." If there are things you'd like to me to talk about on either of those topics, leave a comment and I'll try and incorporate them into the presentations. :)

Vancouver's a wonderful place with a great local community. Hope to see you there!

Note: This is a re-post of http://drupal.org/node/443102 for Drupal Planet, since apparently a lot of you don't read the Drupal.org front page. ;) Sorry if it's old news to you!

Have you been looking for an excuse to play around a bit with Drupal 7, and have an interest in helping to directly shape it? Would you like to not only see how Drupal core contributors collaborate together, but become one yourself? Do you have an itch you'd like scratched and are willing to help scratch others' in return? Would you like to be exposed to new and interesting areas of Drupal you might not have otherwise experienced? Are you exceptionally good at finding faults and breaking things?

If so, drop by #drupal-dev on irc.freenode.net this weekend (April 25 and 26) for a patch review sprint! (What is a patch review sprint? / How to connect to IRC?) While somewhat informal, there will be people around all weekend to help get new patch reviewers started and to help guide seasoned contributors to important patches.

Our goal is to try and knock the core patches to review queue down to zero (or as close to it as possible) by trying out patches to see how they work, and recommending ways that they can be improved. The Patch review sprints page has more information on how patch reviews work, a handy cheat-sheet of all the commands you need, and a list of prerequisites in order to participate.

Please note that "coding skills" is not on the list of prerequisites. While people with coding skills can perform certain types of reviews better than non-coders, non-coders can also perform certain types of reviews better than coders. In short: everyone is welcome!

Hope to see you there! :)

There is currently a lively, spirited debate about the forthcoming user experience changes for Drupal 7. A quick summary for those who have been unaware of this initiative: everyone (yes, especially you) needs to go to http://www.d7ux.org/ and actively participate in the discussion/brainstorming/wireframing/etc. in order to ensure that the end result is something we can all be proud of and meets our community's very diverse needs!

It's been interesting to watch the range of opinions expressed in the thread. On the one side you have people who have first-hand experience with how excruciatingly painful the learning curve can be for new users, either because they themselves had to wrestle for weeks about menus vs. taxonomy vs. nodes, or because they've spent time around others (co-workers, clients, spouses, etc.) and have watched them struggle. They're very excited about the prospect of some of these pervasive user experience issues being looked at in a very serious way. On the other side you have long-time members of the community, many of them prolific contributors, who are adept ninjas configuring Drupal sites. They don't want to see Drupal "dumbed down" to the lowest common denominator. In fact, the whole reason they initially chose and continue to stick with Drupal is the sheer power it places into their hands, and with great power comes a learning curve; it's to be expected.

At my "day job" at Lullabot, we've been hard at work on the Drupal UE (Usability Edition), which includes many fine improvements that I'd love to see make their way into Drupal 7. But what about our roots, the hardcore developers who eat, sleep, and breathe Drupal? Who is watching out for their interests?

In a fit of insomnia early this morning, I put together what I hope will be the start of a robust framework that optimizes Drupal's UX, but this time for the developer. I call it Better Admin module.

Addison "add1sun" Berry is the Drupal project's documentation team lead, as well as a developer, themer, cat herder, and generally awesome person. :)

I met Addi at the very first Lullabot workshop in Washington, DC in October 2006. Addi really stood out from the crowd with her obvious desire to help other people learn; if the person next to her looked bewildered about what was going on at the front of the room, she'd stop what she was working on and help them. She'd ask really great questions that would help frame difficult material in a way that new users could understand. And obviously, the good first impressions stuck; she's now helping to teach Lullabot workshops as part of the team. :)

A few months later as we were preparing Drupal 5 for release, I posted to the Drupal Dojo group about some "low-hanging fruit" code style clean-up patches that needed to be written. I tried to make the post as clear as possible what needed to be done, but wasn't ultimately sure if we'd get anyone to bite. Lo and behold within a week or so, this "add1sun" person had gone nuts and finished off about half of them. :) But rolling patches wasn't enough; she also created a how-to video to show other people what she'd learned, which remains one of our most invaluable resources for getting new contributors started.

While Addi was officially made the Drupal Documentation Team Lead back in October 2008, she had been coordinating larger documentation team efforts for quite some time before that. In Drupalcon Szeged, and again in Drupalcon DC, she helped identify a number of tasks for new folks to work on, and mobilized a small army to tackle tasks such as incorporating comments into documentation, filling in missing documentation gaps, and more. Addi excels at turning people who want to help but don't know where to start into completely immersed, rock-star contributors. And now that she has received funding from the Knight Foundation to make Drupal documentation rock, she'll be able to spread this message all over the world.

See the theme here? Addi rocks! ;)

What I think makes Addi's story even more remarkable is that she does not come from any kind of technical background; her educational background is in anthropology, and her job prior to Lullabot was stamping papers in a federal court. She taught herself HTML, CSS, PHP, and Drupal. She went up an enormous learning curve at a frenetic pace and has managed to turn herself into a superstar contributor in a very short period of time. She's a true symbol for everyone out there that anyone who puts their mind to it can not only overcome the Drupal learning curve, but can excel at bringing others up along with them as well.

You rock, Addi! :)

If you'd like, you can read more about Addi at Virginia DeBolt's interview on BlogHer.

Now that the Drupal.org redesign is underway, Neil Drumm is currently collecting suggestions for what a revamped Drupal Association website might look like.

The current website was created in a few days back when the Drupal Association was first founded in 2006, and hasn't really received a great deal of attention since then (shoemaker's children, and all that). The current site's content can basically be distilled into three things:

1. Outdated news you already heard somewhere else first.
2. Give us money.
3. Legal mumbo jumbo.

Unfortunately, there is very little emphasis on "awesome stuff the Drupal Association is working on and how you can help." That's something I think we need to change, to both help give the community assurances that their money is being spent wisely, and also to give the larger Drupal community on-ramps to directly help the Drupal Association members achieve their mission of supporting the Drupal project.

Here's a wireframe I came up with at Way Too Late O'Clock that needs a whole bunch of work but is one approach:

The idea is to both emphasize larger spheres of responsibility that the Drupal Association has, and also highlight both what's happening NOW as well as an archive of what we've achieved in the past.

How about yourself? Do you have thoughts on what you'd like to see in a revamped Drupal Association website? Want to play wireframe ping-pong? I'll collect any responses given here and send them off to Neil on Wednesday, March 19.

Arie Nagel (or ainigma32 on Drupal.org) is a relatively "new" face in the Drupal community (he has yet to reach his one-year anniversary on Drupal.org), but yet has already made a profound impact on our project for the better.

How? By answering the cries of fellow Drupalistas' requests for help!

Arie has done a laudable job farming the Drupal core issue queue for support requests, closing out old ones, asking for more info on unclear ones, and helping out on those that he can. His tracker page shows a nearly endless stream of helpful, courteous responses, and he shows genuine concern for making sure users find the answers they're looking for. This is a tremendous contribution to the Drupal project. Hats off to you, Arie! :D

Without spoiling the interview ahead of time, something that Arie alludes to that I can back up whole-heartedly is that helping other users with support requests is the single fastest way to skyrocket your way up the Drupal learning curve. If you don't know the answer to something, seeking out the answer for others will give you a chance to teach yourself in a very practical way (or learn from others who end up answering the person's question). And if you do know the answer, nothing cements a topic in your head more than explaining to others how to do it. Finally, even if you consider yourself a total "newbie", believe me, you still know more than someone else out there, and you are far better positioned to explain it to them in a way that makes sense.

Learn more about how to get involved in user support at the Getting Involved guide.

Here's Arie's interview where he discusses how he came to Drupal, what motivates him to help out, and some ideas for improving Drupal support in the future.

(Hey, neat! This was mentioned on ZDNet: Perfectionists need not apply.)

Most people in the free software community have probably read Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which compares and contrasts two free software development models: the Cathedral style (think, "perfectionism") and the Bazaar style (think, "chaos").

While Drupal itself is clearly an open, Bazaar-style project, many individuals in the Drupal community tend to take the perfectionist approach to development. After all, *thousands* of people will be using this code, and likely *hundreds* of developers carefully inspecting its inner-workings. How embarrassing would it be for another developer to stumble across a "no-brainer" bug in your code? Best to sit on things until you know it's really solid before putting it out there in front of people. Right?

Sure, that sounds logical. But in my experience, people who take this approach to development in an open source community, and especially the Drupal community, are at a severe disadvantage to those who embrace the chaos and put their changes out in front of everyone as they're going along, warts and all.

I'll attempt to illustrate this by way of a dramatization comparing the problem-solving approach of two hypothetical Drupal developers: Sloppy Sam, and Perfectionist Pat.

It's 2009, and Contributor Spotlight is back! This edition, we focus on Daniel F. Kudwien (sun on drupal.org and "tha_sun" in #drupal), CEO of Unleashed Mind.

Daniel is a rock-star Drupal coder who has contributed too many awesome modules to count. A few that you might be familiar with are Administration Menu, which makes the Drupal administrative interface a breeze to use, Upgrade Status, which gives you details on the porting status of your modules between major Drupal versions, and WYSIWYG API, a module with the goal to provide a single, centralized way to add any graphical editor you can imagine to Drupal.

Daniel has a real knack for staring down an extremely complicated problem, ruthlessly slapping away distractions, and coming up with an ingenious solution that not only solves the original problem, but does so with elegance.

Which brings us to the tale of node #8: Let users cancel their accounts.

node/8 is the oldest open Drupal core issue in existence, dating back to 2001. The deceptively simple title makes it seem like this would be a brain-dead problem to solve. Just provide a button for users to delete their own accounts. Duh! What's the problem?

The problem is, what happens when that button is clicked? Is the user account deleted from the database, or only blocked? Some organizations have legal requirements to retain data for 180 days, others have legal requirements to remove all traces of their users. But even trickier, what happens to the content that the user posted? Is it deleted as well? Scrubbed of contents? Attributed to the anonymous user? Simply unpublished? What about other users' content that might reference content posted by removed users, or might be direct replies? Do they get the axe, too?

If you read the issue comments, you will see people coming up with absolutely no shortage of opinions on all of the above, and multiple times, this has caused the issue to go completely off the rails. Most of us had lost hope, thinking node/8 would never get solved.

And then along came Daniel.

With swift precision, Daniel managed to distill the use cases down to the four most common, provide a hook so that other modules can cut in and do their business, and all the while rallying the troops in #drupal to contribute where they could, either by bouncing around ideas or providing language improvements or reviewing the code. And! I'm happy to report that node/8 was fixed at last earlier today, January 8... 8 days after Daniel began his journey. :) This was an inspiring process to watch and to be a part of, and showed that anything is possible if we all band together.

So, who is this mystery man? Is he tenacious, a little bit insane, or both? ;) Find out, in the following interview!