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The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students in the Research Methods class, taught by professor Kathryn Summers, have completed a usability study on Drupal. The Drupal community has been working with Becca Scollan in the usability group.

The usability research used video recordings and eye tracking tools to follow participants gaze in the Drupal interface. The study used eight participants, which is considered a valid sample. The study duplicated some tests done in usability testing at the University of Minnesota, and confirmed several results.

Addi Berry, Kent Bye, Angie Byron, Nate Haug, and Jeff Robbins answer 60 beginning Drupal questions in 60 minutes (more or less).

Here's the list (and links mentioned on the podcast):

We just finished working on the Pandemic Preparedness Capacity Project, a new tool for InterAction and USAID that will be used to help prevent the spread of catastrophic disease outbreaks, especially bird flu. The goal of the site is to both improve both data collection from public health organizations on the ground and improve data visualization for policy makers here in Washington, D.C. We built this dynamic mapping portal on all open source software: the content management system is Drupal and the mapping stack is running on Mapnik, a C++/Python GIS toolkit.

El pasado 13 de junio se anunció el proyecto Portal Web Municipal que ofrece la Diputación de Castellón a todos los municipios de la provincia.

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Almost all community work really "happens" in the Drupal.org issue queue. This is where the community can track all of the todos for all of our projects. Every project has a queue. This means Drupal core, contributed modules and themes and even the drupal.org website and documentation have queues. This video covers how to find the queue you need, gives a little orientation, then shows how to search for existing issues and create a new issue.

For the past year or so, there have been periodic questions raised about Drupal's licensing status. Is it GPL version 2? Are we moving to GPL version 3? Could we even if we wanted to? Is it OK to write a module that does [something weird]? As a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors, I made it my task to sort out the answers to those questions.

Understanding licensing, and the differences between licenses, is more important than some realize. Open source is not the same as public domain. Open source and Free Software requires that source code be made available and that others are allowed to make use and share of the source code, but there are rules attached to how they can do so just as there is with proprietary software. For example, not all open source software can be combined, and there are requirements for how you distribute the source code of a program. Knowing which of those rules apply to Drupal, and to Drupal modules and themes, is important not only for the health of the code base (so we know what we can and can't do with the work of over a thousand people) but also to the health of the growing commercial Drupal economy.

I am pleased to announce that we now do have firm answers to these questions, and have a new and shiny FAQ up to answer them. There is nothing new in the FAQ; it is just a clarification of some edge cases that didn't used to exist.

When the site gets too busy, the throttle module kicks in and search disappears for a while. In an effort to cut down on the number of posts reporting this, I am linking to all the recent ones here and promoting this.

When it's down, you can always use Google. Just put "site:drupal.org" in your query.

http://drupal.org/node/270417
http://drupal.org/node/272571
http://drupal.org/node/271612
http://drupal.org/node/269992
http://drupal.org/node/271694
http://drupal.org/node/271936
http://drupal.org/node/272208
http://drupal.org/node/270705
http://drupal.org/node/272506
http://drupal.org/node/255841

Last week I posted about adding multilingual subtitles to video content using JW FLV Media Player and Drupal. The workflow I described involves attaching a W3C Timed-Text XML file to a node using an upload form. It’s great for initial translations because you can take advantage of a desktop captioning tool, but what happens when you need to make small changes or corrections? We decided that requiring the user to download the file, edit it, and re-upload it was a major usability issue.

My solution is to parse the contents of the Timed-Text file into a CCK field so it can be manipulated directly on the node editing form. The uploaded file is parsed and the CCK field is populated right before your eyes using an AJAX callback, and the interface allows users to add additional lines of captions dynamically thanks to some logic borrowed from the Link module. Once the node is saved, the CCK field can be used with a custom views style plugin to display a fully formatted Timed-Text XML file.

You can watch what I did in this screencast:

The June DC Drupal meetup is happening tonight at 7:15 pm at Stetsons. If you're a Drupal developer, user, or newbie, come out to share what you've been working on and to listen to what other people are doing with Drupal. Last month we had 40+ people come out. We're hoping to draw just as big and enthusiastic of a crowd tonight.

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The official start of summer is right around the corner (in five days to be precise), but the DC tech scene isn't slowing down yet. Here are the events we're planning to check out this week. You can see a full listing of what's happening in the local tech scene here.

Tonight
7:15 to 9:00 pm
DC Drupal Meetup: The monthly networking meetup for Drupal developers, users, and newbies is tonight. Come out to share what you've been working on or what you need and listen to what others are doing with the software.

Thursday
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Internet Advocacy Roundtable: This month's roundtable is tackling the crucial question, how do you find out where your audience hangs out online? Head over to the roundtable to hear what a few experts recommend.

Our redesign of World Resources Institute’s main website just launched and we saved considerable configuration time implementing the design with Context UI. Here are four screenshots to show you how Content UI can take a smart information architecture and simply map it to a Drupal site.

In the first screenshot, you can see the architecture and design we built. In the second screen shot, you see how we mapped our IA to Drupal with context definitions. This is the admin/build/context page, which shows all the “sections” or “features” we defined for this Drupal site. In the third screenshot, you get a sense of the specific definitions on the news page. This shows you the the bundles of views, content types, panels, menu items, and blocks. Lastly on the 4th screenshot, you see how those definitions mapped to the main news page.

This Wednesday we opened the registration for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 and some of the early birds are already in! If you sign up before the end of June you will be able to buy your ticket at the extra discounted price of 80 EUR. From July the price will increase to 120 EUR, from August on to 160 EUR and just before and during the conference it will be 200 EUR to attend. We also help you get a hotel room and buy shuttle bus tickets until July 24, so if you'd like to go the easy way, make sure to register by then.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that less than half the web is in English. However, when managing large sites in multiple languages, it's good to be constantly aware of what language you're working with. That's why we wrote internationalization support for the ApacheSolr search module. With the new patches and a slight change to the search index schema, ApacheSolr will store the languages you choose with the i18n module. Then you can enable the Language Filter block to perform faceted searches based on language - to drill down to those that you speak or read.

You can see how it works in this screencast.