The following message and links really drive home the beauty of open source, and the exciting dynamics of the Drupal community – the open source project we’re using as the CMS - content management system – at the core of the REALNEO community.

You’ll see that a computer user experience expert posted a criticism of all CMS systems and the Drupal community responded with a real open source challenge – Drupal developers offer to volunteer dozens of free hours of effort to fix anything this expert identifies as usability issues with Drupal – and all this free effort will make Drupal better for us. We are at the heart of this vibrant community, as one of the developers involved in this challenge is working on our project for Bryght. All this insight building is happening in the public space at the links below!

Usability, documentation, etc

- Jeffrey Veen wrote about open source CMS usability:
http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000622.html

- The Drupal community responded:
http://drupal.org/node/11293

- Which included a deal:
http://drupal.org/node/11293#comment-17359

The Deal is the Drupal community will set up a Drupal site for this usability expert to test, and then the Drupal experts will donate time to solve any problems the usability expert identifies. These problems address things like ease of use, ease to install, documentation, administration, etc – very useful enhancements.

This is what I’d call a Flash Project, where in a blog over a few hours a problem is identified, strategies are devised, and resources are alocated.

Visit the links to see for yourself.