It’s clear from Dries’ blog entry that the future of Drupal is going to lean more and more towards enhancing the User Experience. Drupal excels in functionality, but it is often lacking in terms of being able to actually accomplish the minutiae of setting up a site.

A quick look at all of the stuff I’ve contributed to Drupal since I started will suggest that I also consider the user experience very important. I am big on configurability; very little of what I’ve written has actually added new functionality. The bulk of it has simply made it easier to configure things to be the way you want. Dashboards simply make columnation easier. Views make collections easier. Nodequeue makes a specific type of categorization easier. The very fact that node queue exists and that people choose it is an indication that taxonomy, while very powerful, is lacking somewhat in User Experience.

All that aside, that isn’t what I’m here to talk about.

One of the things that bugs me about Drupal is the sort of tepid response we, as a community, are giving to outsiders. This is due, in part, to the growing pains of the community going from a fairly tight-knit handful of people to a very, very large morass of people with varying opinions, and a constant need for support.

This is particularly true on the IRC. In #drupal one will find a bot, named Druplicon, who’s been programmed to tell people who ask support questions to go away to another channel. This is fine, but I have a problem with that. I had a problem with that when I first hit the IRC, and I expressed it, and I was shot down. The arguments shooting me down failed to convince me, so now I am bringing my argument here, where they can be viewed over and over again.

My argument? That #drupal has so grown that it is time — in fact, it is well past time — to change. Originally, #drupal was a collection of people working on the project. Most of the users were also developers. Perhaps there was some interest from outsiders here and there, but it was modest. The channel served its purpose well.

Since 4.5 and some larger recognition of the software, new users have been piling into the system by the hundreds. One of the first places many people go is #drupal, only to be smacked aside with the response — sometimes rather rude — that “This is a developer channel!”. How are they supposed to know that? Yea, I know it’s in the topic, but IRC is a morass of spam and confusing messages. Topics get lost in scroll very quickly. And the name of the channel is just #drupal. I was told that it had to do with the age of the channel and tradition, and that newbies should learn to read.

I disagree with this. As Drupal moves forward, I believe we want to make the experience for new users easier. Every time we kick someone in the shin and say “WRONG!” for something trivial like that, we push another person who might have been benefited by using Drupal toward another system. I believe it is time to split off the dev-specific channel into #drupal-dev and let #drupal be an all-around Drupal chat channel. This might even quiet the dev channel somewhat, where we often get a little chatty and Off-Topic; it’d be more acceptable to be off-topic on #drupal and fewer users would come to #drupal-dev and have their first impression be that the people who work on that project are rude and unhelpful. I know of at least one example where someone is in the process of evaluating Drupal vs Movable Type for his group, and I’m told that the general impression of people he got after several hours on #drupal may push them to MT, for no other reason than fear that the people behind Drupal simply didn’t care about a quality user experience.

I think this kind of change goes hand-in-hand with the documentation re-organization that’s going on. The whole point there is to make it easier for people to find what they need in the docs. It’s well recognized that the documentation is largely there, but it is hard to attach relevance to any particular piece of material. In the case of IRC, it’s clear that the channel is there, but the experience in the channel is a First Impression and one can never underestimate the lingering power this impression will have.