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Filmmaker John Waters began his career as an "underground success", making films that mainstream wouldn't touch because they were too controversial, raunchy, or just plain weird. After several underground successes, however, he started to get noticed outside of underground and indie circles and move into the mainstream, where he had even more commercial success.
Many of his fans derided him for the move, claiming he was "caving into the man" or betraying his underground roots by adapting his style for wider audiences. In an interview for his 1998 film Pecker, Waters made the comment (sadly I do not have the direct quote handy) that the problem with being an underground success is that you then, by definition, cannot stay underground. And yes, that means you sometimes have to change things.
Why do I bring this up? Because Drupal has long since ceased being an underground success and is now a major mainstream open source player... and it's time that the community acted like it.
We all have our favorite Web sites that we go to when we want to check the news, drool over the latest gadget, read our favorite blog, or just waste some time online. If you’re like me, you go there and feel right at home because everything is where it should be (or least where you’ve gotten used to it being). Now, think back to the last time one of your favorite sites got redesigned...
Ah! The horror!
Even when done right, a Web site redesign inevitablely requires a major cognitive shift for its existing audience. In order to minimize the impact of this shift while simultaneously creating an experience that will draw in new users, I find that the key is to start the process by asking the question, "Is it obvious?"
In order to avoid overwhelming even the most experienced users, a Web site's visual cues and structure needs to just make sense. Let's start by taking a look at an example from real life:
At Palantir, the values of interconnectedness, freedom, and openness shape and inform the projects that we work on. When we have the opportunity to collaborate with clients who share those values, the results can be pretty outstanding.
That’s why we were happy to have the opportunity to work with Acquia and Red Hat to build opensource.com, a new Drupal-based community Web site that aims to spread the word about how the open source way can bring people together to solve problems that impact the world around us.
As Drupal project lead and Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert mentioned in his blog post earlier this week, the site is centered around discussions on how open source is having an impact in business, education, government, law, and life. While many people know open source as a software development method, the goal of the site is to take the dialogue far beyond just technology.
You can learn more about how opensource.com was built in our case study, and we hope that you’ll consider checking out the site and joining the conversation today!
Although Palantir uses Subversion for most our development, we do occasionally use other version control systems if a specific client needs to. Typically that ends up being git. I've personally only used it on one project so far, but did discover one interesting little feature that makes me really like it: bisect.
