From May 17 - 19, 2011, in advance of DrupalCamp Twin Cities, several Drupal community members met at the University of Minnesota usability lab in Minneapolis to perform a round of formal usability testing on Drupal 7. This is the fourth major usability testing for Drupal, and the first targeting the new Drupal 7 release.

People who were familiar with building websites (but not with Drupal) were observed while they worked through a number of site building tasks. This report contains a summary of the results.

Summary

The good news is that most of the changes that were put in Drupal 7 tested well. Compared to Drupal 6, Drupal 7 no longer confuses new users with basic conceptual hurdles like where the front-end vs. back-end of their site is and how to create an "About us" page, and for the most part the administrative interface is clear.

We are proud to announce DrupalCon London's keynote speakers: Tom Standage, The Web Standardistas and, of course, Dries Buytaert.

Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead and President of the Drupal Association, will kick-off the conference with his State of Drupal keynote presentation on Tuesday, 23rd August.

Dries Buytaert will discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss the future of Drupal 8 and give an update on the core initiatives that were set-up since the last DrupalCon.

Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source Web publishing platform or “the reason there is a DrupalCon in the first place”. In addition, he is also the co-founder and CTO of Acquia, a company that offers hosting, technical support, and services for the Drupal platform, and the co-founder of Mollom, a web service that helps identify content quality and stop website spam.

Drupal 7.1 and 6.21, maintenance releases which fix security vulnerabilities are now available for download.

Drupal 7.2 and 6.22 also fix other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

Pagebuild allows non technical users to build websites very quickly and easily. It was built on top of Drupal, with the idea behind it being to provide an editing interface that is so simple, even an adult could use it. This is a explanation of what we did and how we went about doing it (and why).

We're delighted to announce the array of courses available for DrupalCon London, which will be held August 22-26, 2011. View the course listing at http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/training

Despite Melissa Anderson (eliza411)'s low user number on Drupal.org, she was a relatively quiet contributor until about halfway through the Great Git Migration, when she took over as project manager of that huge undertaking. Melissa’s scope, focus, and competence [editor’s note: a dreadful understatement!] continue to amaze everyone, and she is generally accepted as a fundamental reason that the Git Migration was completed on schedule and to such great reception.

Hailing from a small Alaska town with a background in education, Melissa is now officially co-lead of the Git Project with Sam Boyer. Randy Fay, Sam Boyer, and the entire Git migration team have nominated Melissa in honor of her incredible contribution.

To get to know her a little better, we asked Melissa a few questions:

How did you get involved in Drupal? Seems like it was a while ago...

I needed a solution for managing information in a public way. I tried Postnuke, but it was a complete #fail. Some very interesting friends recommended Mambo (now Joomla) and Drupal.