Drupal 7: The best version yet?!

Have you heard that Drupal 7 will get a facelift, but to the backend? Yup. Drupal 7 should be the best upgrade yet with attention being put into the usability and interaction of the backend, administrative panels. How do I know this?

While at the IxDA conference held in Vancouver I attended Leisa Reichelt's "Designing by Community: Redesigning the Drupal.org Website" session where she went over the process her organization, Disambiguity, used to redevelop the Drupal.org site. At the end she spoke about how her organization was queuing up to help Drupal redesign the application, creating a better user experience for those who administrate and use Drupal. At that point, the redesign with their involvement seemed to be more at the discussion stage than a firm plan.

Yesterday I received the IxDA newsletter. In it Liz Bacon, the VP and Director of the Interaction Design Association, said the IxDA is going to be using Drupal for their next site. Cool decision given all the options they have to choose from and the attention to design this association has. This decision reminded me of Leisa's presentation so I did a bit of research to see if she's onto that work. I found Mark Boultan's post that him and Leisa have started the redesign of the new Drupal 7 application.

So, there you have it. Drupal is getting the attention to the backend that is long overdue. I'm sure many are of the opinion that one large barrier to Drupal adoption has been the verbose and clunky administrative interfaces. With real user research and design being done by real interaction designers Drupal 7 could be the best update evahhh.