I've been in the streets of Dries for three and a half year now. It feels even daring saying it are Dries' streets because I know he does not like it if people give him too much credit. But it is true. Dries I believe the key factor for Drupal's success is your astounding ability to gather the right people around you. This combined with a mixture of leadership and fostering self-empowerment appears to work pretty well.

Having started with using the system for my diploma (I guess you say bachelor elsewhere), it has been an amazing ride. But the story of drupal is not so much unique as it is a story of open source. Seeing a new youtube star the other day one can feel the upside of the digital revolution and the new channels of communicating and doing things via the internet.

Like in every other social community there are downsides as well. Even at my first drupalcon in Barcelona I was a bit worried about the quasi-religious way Dries keynote was celebrated. This was not much different from Steve Jobs presenting the Iphone. Give us a sign, we will celebrate whatever you say.

Still this does not need to have negative effects. Personally I find it very important to go outside the community from time to time. Yes, there is a life outside of drupal. Take a bit of distance now and then and balance comes back quickly. Also Mr. Buytaert takes care of staying a normal community member as far as this is possible. If you have been inside the project for a while, he will come up to you at a Drupal Camp and have a little chat. Simple, ingenious method. Which does not say there is not a real interest in the person spoken to.

There are a lot UI Improvements under way for Drupal 7. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be sure if these really are improvements and we don't overlook small details that make the entire building crumble? How about ongoing, small-scale, crowdsourced user testing. Leisa Reichelt issued a similar call some time ago to test the admin header. A pleasing number of people tested the header and helped checking the names of the top-level categories and testing (probably confirming) the usefulness of the entire concept.

What this is up to is a sustainable concept that will ideally be an ongoing process. Apart from this mid-term goal there is also a very here-and-now one: we need to urgently test the D7UX stuff before Drupal 7 comes out or before the time even for small changes is over.

You can help by:

1. do testing and upload the videos
2. find some participants, if you don't want to do testing yourself
3. be a testing participant if you don't know Drupal too well

A perfect participant has some web experience, has mastered things like ebay product selling forms and maybe has some experience in other cms's or blogging software. No. 2 of the above list would mean another motivated tester has won some participants and could carry out the tests with them. Personally I am willing to do quite some testing, this can be a lot of fun :) We need interviewers and test participants, so what about building up an infrastructure where we have

This is the start of a screencast series. I am going to follow the D7UX Changes as they go to core or maturing more to get ready for core. What you are looking at when you play the video is a special version of drupal, that you can checkout via SVN from this Google repository: So don't be worried if you see something that breaks or looks pre-alpha: It won't have made its way to core. As pointed out in the video, there is quite some issues to overcome. This is also a call to action, if you are a dev and sympathise with the D7UX project: join the crowd and help pushing this along, so it will be shiny and intuitive. The main Issues this is being worked on are http://drupal.org/node/517688 and http://drupal.org/node/484820 An overview of all d7ux issues is here: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=d7ux

The entire thing is geared towards

Drupal is modular. Drupal is more modular. Sometimes you feel Drupal is _too_ modular. Example: The recommended best practice for building a mainainable and generic image gallery uses at least seven Modules: CCK, Views, Filefield, Imageapi, Imagecache, Imagefield, A batch uploader like image fupload plus a template file and css for your theme. Uff. And now here you go and explain to a beginner that Drupal is easy.

Thing is: in the end it is quite a simple structure. Recently I came to my personal best practice: Using multiple values for an imagefield and the new image fupload for slick batch uploads. With the new feature in imagefield to add captions to images even when using multiple values and the ability to rearrange the order with the drag and drop widget there is not much to miss. With some Views and Taxonomy magic one should be able to build _Really_ large multiuser galleries, and if you want to seperate the images better you make single nodes of each - good news image fupload also supports this option. Sounds like a missing link, eh?