The Buzzr Demo Video - Making Drupal Usable
A few weeks ago, I put together an April Fool's Day post about a bunch of usability work that Lullabot had been doing with Drupal. My favorite April 1 posts are usually heavily based in reality, and, as we've mentioned previously, Lullabot has, in fact, been doing a lot of work trying to create a streamlined version of Drupal.
We started our project about a year ago, working with Karen McGrane from Bond Art + Science heading up our user experience work and Ed Sussman coordinating all of the business aspects of the project. We spent about 8 months building a prototype and started fund raising a little over 4 months ago. Having done all of this work on spec, and since it's still in flux, we were hesitant to share it publicly during our ongoing V.C. meetings.
But as we've been watching the great usability work that Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing for Drupal 7, we've found that they're struggling with a lot of same issues that we have, and even starting to solve them in the same ways.
So rather than playing it conservatively and keeping our work hidden, we've decided to unveil it to the world and contribute our thinking to the usability discussion. Our project, now called Buzzr, is still moving forward and there are many more features and ideas that we are working on. But I've made this video to highlight many of our usability ideas and show how they were implemented... no joke!
Enjoy.
Problems playing the video embedded here? Go to http://blip.tv/file/1988015 for other formats and options.
You can view the original post and comments on Lullabot's website here.
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Comments
Wonderful article, thanks for putting this together! This is obviously one great post. Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here.
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Thank you for your efforts. Your doing really great stuff!
And drupal will be even more cooler and easy to handle as it already is!
Thank you for your efforts. Your doing really great stuff!
As everyone noted, very cool stuff. I'm also really glad for the things that are getting contribed back. I'm wondering if this is all stuff you are planning on giving back or will you be holding some back as Lullabot private stuff. That's cool if you are, just curious what the end goal is. Will anything be conflicting between buzzr and the d7ux stuff? high quality web templates
Well, this is a masterpiece, that won’t easily be topped. Just like Drupal builds upon Apache/PHP, Buzzr builds upon Drupal. It takes unusual vision and talent to execute a leap like this. And buckets of hard work. Thanks for taking drupal and content management to the next level.
pretty good video
Things I would love to see:
- Drag and drop navigation items (to manually reorder page hirarchy)
- Add Navigation Item Buttons right in the Navigation
- Drag and drop Views outputs (could can be used to: to manually reorder reorder articles in a list )
- Drag and Drop CCK outputs (to manually reorder images in a slide show etc.)
All the above, is already working. But this would be cool, if people can do the above, without having to hit a "edit" button. But can do it right on the "normal" site output.
Agreed with this
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Looks extremely cool!
Bravo! Looks really promising!
Love your approach.
I think this will be a great help for site Administrators and Authors, who don't are "computer geeks" but want to administer the site.
Probably, the site building will mostly be done by a web designer, and the authors will be their clients.
Therefore, I concentrated a little more on administer content.
Things I would love to see:
- Drag and drop navigation items (to manually reorder page hirarchy)
- Add Navigation Item Buttons right in the Navigation
- Drag and drop Views outputs (could can be used to: to manually reorder reorder articles in a list )
- Drag and Drop CCK outputs (to manually reorder images in a slide show etc.)
All the above, is already working. But this would be cool, if people can do the above, without having to hit a "edit" button. But can do it right on the "normal" site output.
See this module:
http://drupal.org/project/draggableviews
Thats how a navigation block should look like.
Or the Menu settings in node edit.
That would be a tremendous step forward and easy to understand for low-computer-skills site admins.
For some inspiration, have a look at this cms called Magnolia. It has some great usability features.
(Templates are also easy to customize, as drupal. But I am not using it because its outrageously expansive, server requirements are too high, and the core is complex (to me) to edit)
Thank you for your efforts. Your doing really great stuff!
And drupal will be even more cooler and easy to handle as it already is!
Cheers
Really like the drag and drop of the entire interface! Thanks for sharing!
Looks solid, specially the style editor.
Check out http://www.kickdeveloper.com/resources/customize-your-pages/introduction... for another take on real time css styling.
All the best.
I'm still hanging out for the release of buzzr :) Can't wait, good work guys.
- Sean Bannister
Thanks this clip is awesome :)
This looks really great. Can't wait to see this in action.
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