"Jesse", a blogger who apparently has just one article and either wants to build a reputation for a new venture or simply wants to be anonymous (hard to say which) posted a fairly long article on his site called 4 problems with Drupal.

I read this article, and I started out a little annoyed. It makes some false or at least misleading assertions. I immediately commented on one obvious one, and then as I thought about it, I felt a need to address the entirety of his arguments, because they are, in all, flawed.

This is still very much in progress. I’m told it doesn’t work at all on Safari, and even in Firefox it has some quirks. Doesn’t even save yet. But you can drag panels around. Add content. Remove content. Pretend to configure the content.

http://panels.demo.logrus.com/

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been interested in Access Control Lists. In the previously mentioned article, I said some erroneous things. In a later article, I meant to correct them, but I was buzzing so much from excitement that all I managed to get out was “I did it.” Well, I did implement ACLs, and I did it without patching core.

This article isn’t really about ACLs, but it is about one of the things the ACL module does — which is to provide a widget to seamlessly edit the user list.

One annoying thing about having a million things to do is that no matter which of those million things I’m doing, there’s 999,999 other things that I’m feeling guilty about for not doing. But all of them are important at one level or another. Today I didn’t do some Views debugging that I really meant to do. Instead, after my housemate took his first look at Drupal, all those thoughts and ideas I have about Drupal’s administrative interface came to the surface.

In this article, I want to talk about the whole process of the work I’ve done, what led up to it, the road ahead, why it’s important, and where I hope it will go.

This actually started out as a single idea, then it blossomed into three ideas, and then at the very end of my thinking, it reduced to two ideas. Apparently I’d forgotten why I’d written a certain high profile module, and it took me a good 30 minutes to realize I was approaching it from the slightly wrong angle.

In order to preserve that flawed logic, I will describe my train of thought: One of the things I have long wanted, but have not yet gotten around to doing, is to allow scheduling based upon the Node Queue. One of the original design points, and the reason it’s even called a queue is that it’s supposed to be a bucket that a site maintainer can drop nodes in. They go in on one end, and eventually they go out another end.

Somehow I forgot to mention this on my blog, but a week or two ago I ported a theme from OSWD primarily for use on a friend’s site; as I got it ready, I realized I had only another hour (or 2 or 3..) of work to make it a fully usable theme, so I did.

The theme is called Antique Modern and the original is by Aaron Ganshow AKA wildleaf.

One of the things that happened with Angry Donuts here is that while I was fiddling with the logo and stuff, someone popped into the IRC and started asking about how hard it would be to implement DHTML menus based on this script. The person went by Aw0L and I have no idea who that is, otherwise, but I did end up getting the script working, after giving it a pretty serious workover.

So you have Views, and you've figured out exposed filters. Which, in short, gives nice handy little widgets to search. Often by keyword or by some taxonomy term.

Now what you want to do is put that functionality in a block. Say you're doing a catalog search or you have something you just want to always be up.

No Problem!

It’s clear from Dries’ blog entry that the future of Drupal is going to lean more and more towards enhancing the User Experience. Drupal excels in functionality, but it is often lacking in terms of being able to actually accomplish the minutiae of setting up a site.

A quick look at all of the stuff I’ve contributed to Drupal since I started will suggest that I also consider the user experience very important. I am big on configurability; very little of what I’ve written has actually added new functionality. The bulk of it has simply made it easier to configure things to be the way you want. Dashboards simply make columnation easier. Views make collections easier. Nodequeue makes a specific type of categorization easier. The very fact that node queue exists and that people choose it is an indication that taxonomy, while very powerful, is lacking somewhat in User Experience.

All that aside, that isn’t what I’m here to talk about.

An incredibly common complaint about Drupal is in that its terminology is often arcane and difficult to understand. And while the substance of these complaints are actually right, many people come to what I consider the wrong conclusion, and it's this wrong conclusion that is actually the root of what is currently wrong with Drupal's use of terminology.

Let's take a look at some actual problems with terminology.

Taxonomy