Drupal Gardens - A first look

NOTE: ~ The below blog post was first made on my Drupal Gardens site. I have merely copied it over here for everyone to read since the Drupal Gardens site was deleted as it was getting an upgrade. The below review is for the first version of Drupal Gardens. I will be writing a review of the Drupal Gardens beta soon. ~

Welcome to my test site built on Drupal Gardens. I started this to test out the capabilities of Drupal Gardens, more than anything. Though I have been using Drupal for a fair while now, I have tried to approach Drupal gardens with my noob hat on. This means trying to do everything the way a completely non-technical end user might.

I have seen the Drupal Gardens Demo before but I was never sure who the target audience was. Is it meant to be an end user or someone more technical or an existing Drupal developer? In writing this blog post, I tried to evaluate Drupal at the level of a end user to see how it fares. I also tried to compare it to blogger.com and Wordpress.com since those are 2 excellent hosted solutions that layman end users have managed to use without any issues.

The Good

1) WYSIWYG Editor

This is the first drupal install that I am using that comes with a WYSIWYG editor installed out of the box! It has 4 different input filters already configured readily. The input formats available are: SafeHTML, Filtered HTML, Full HTML and Plain Text 

I am not sure what SafeHTML is, but I assume the output is run through a filter like HTML Tidy to remove XSS etc. The editor being used is CKeditor, which is based on the reliable and tested FCKeditor. Interestingly, on the modules page, I saw that the WYSIWYG module has been used. This is odd, since WYSIWYG module does not yet support CKeditor AFAIK. The only working CKeditor implementation for Drupal to date is the CKeditor module .

2) User Interface (UI)

The UI is definitely more intuitive to the end user than the default Drupal 6 interface. For one thing, there is far lesser clutter. Drupal, with fully expanded menus on the navigation block is quite perplexing for a layman to figure out. The ability to easily add shortcuts to the dock at the top is quite nice. Although I still miss the admin menu module with drop downs that I've used on so many Drupal 5 and 6 sites. 

Users has been renamed to People. I am not sure how much this small change improves usability, because laymen can usually relate to 'users' of a website. Not a big deal though.

3) Collecting and Presenting Data

CCK and Views is why many people use Drupal. CCK is a way to collect data into a database through custom entry forms and Views is a way to dynamically query, retrieve and present that collected data. All this without writing a single line of code of SQL command. Unfortunately, both can be quite intimidating to use for a novice. Drupal Gardens has done a good job of implementing CCK and views at a level that would be usable by a novice. 

Users can create new content types and automatically choose to create a listing page for that content type. I always wondered why Drupal did not do that by default for the story and page content type it came with. There is support to add CCK fields of most common types such as text, image, boolean, integer, float, file, taxonomy term reference etc. Since Gardens is a hosted solution, support for other types of CCK fields (e.g. phone numbers & addresses) might be added in the future.

Views is not available in all its glory, but simple views is. This lets a user create pages listing certain content types by default. Though not as powerful as views, it will suffice for the end user.

4) Theming

Theming has finally become easy for a novice. The best drupal solution for theming to date has been themes that support the color module and skinr, which is sadly, not a lot. I am not sure if Gardens uses skinr or other custom module, but it certainly makes it easier to do things like change font sizes, sidebar widths and background without any coding. Like blogger, there is an option to manually edit the CSS, for those who with to customize the theme further.

The Bad

1) Improve Help

Drupal Gardens also has a short help notes on some screens to assist users. For example, on the language options screen, users are told what a .po file is etc. In my opinion, the help could use a bit of a revamp. The less text on the screen, the better the usability for users. If its not something users need to know to use the system, its best omitted. Instead, there should be a way for them to look up help if they wish to, and instantly. And the current help does not even feature a search! 

The best way would be by highlighting the word and having a text overlay popup or by having a floating help window open at all times that users can simply type the term into and look it up. A combination of Glossary and Hovertips/Clicktips  might be able to achieve that.

The help pages feel like they have been written for a technical audience. I wouldn't expect end users to know what boolean, integer and float content types are. Might be better off calling it true/false, regular numbers and fractions instead. Similarly, under site information, it gives options to "Automatically run cron …" Most end users don't know what cron means. Call it "Choose how often to index new items into search index…" etc.

2) Adding Multimedia

I can't add video from Blip.TV or Youtube easily. This is a shame because wordpress does this so easily. An easy solution for this would be to install the Video Filter module  It lets users add a video anywhere by simply typing [video: URL] where URL can be replaced with the actual URL of the video. It supports most major video sharing websites like Blip.TV, Youtube, Vimeo and more.

First conclusions (based on first review)

Since this is still a preview, I am expecting that a lot of things will probably change by the time Drupal Gardens hits stable. So far, I am impressed with some things:

• Improved UI
• Easy interface for positioning of blocks
• Easy theming interface
• Inbuilt WYSIWYG editor
• Pre-configured input filters
• Automatic updating
• Easy support for adding other Languages

Things still to improve

• Help text written in simpler layman language
• Better interface to access to help files, with search
• Video Support for adding from video sharing sites

Things to fix

• Upgrade button is broken
• Community forums link just goes back to the main page

 Wishlist

There is still plenty to wish for on Drupal Gardens:

1) Webform - This module comes with Acquia Drupal, so it surprises me why they left it out on Drupal Gardens. This is a great module and a must have. It will save users from having to go and use SurveryMonkey or another hosted service.

2) CAPTCHA and Spam protection - I assume that Mollom or another form of spam protection will be added in the final service.

3) Multimedia Albums - Wordpress has an easy way to add an image gallery to a blog post. All the uploaded images can simply be presented as a thumbnail gallery under the post. I am guessing this can be achieved in drupal with CCK, Views and Views Slideshow . It would benefit users if such a feature came enabled by default. In addition, having a proper implementation of a multimedia album would be a great boon. An easy way for users to upload images, video and audio, then tag them. Even with the media module enabled, as an end user, there is no way for me to understand how to easily create a multimedia gallery.

4) File manager - A file manager which lets users directly upload files to the FTP server. With the media module enabled, I tried uploading a 6 MB .mp4 video file and received an error: "The specified file video.mp4 could not be uploaded. Only files with the following extensions are allowed: ." May be a bug, or someone forgot to configure an input filter. Should be a small fix.

5) Images - An ability to compress images upon upload using a service like Yahoo's Smush.it   I am aware of Image API and the Imagecache modules, but I believe its better to do the image compression client side rather than server side to reduce bandwidth consumption as well as processing time. I currently encourage all my clients install and run Shrink Pic and use the highest compression setting on it. It works in the background and works great, but I would like to see it implemented through a Java or AJAX application through the browser.

Do you have any opinions to share on this? Let me know in your comments below.