First Impressions

I've just spent some time playing with Drupal Commons and thought I'd post some feedback on my first impressions. To put this in context, I should explain that I'm looking for a solution to provide collaboration tools in our company intranet. This needs to include single sign-on, blogs, wikis, groups, document sharing, calendaring (for booking meetings etc) and a staff directory. Additional project management tools would be preferable, but I guess this would be possible via the other features.

In terms of features, Drupal Commons comes very close to offering what I need - and with a bit of additional development, it looks like it could check all the boxes. However, it feels to me like an unfinished solution at the moment, and I really don't think it's ready for real-world corporate usage.

My main concern is usability. In particular, the interface has no interactivity (which makes it feel rather out-of-date) and each of the sections feels like an add-on rather than an integrated part of a complete application. Here are some specific observations:

• The dashboard doesn't seem to allow any customisation. I would expect to be able to drag and drop elements to change the layout, or at least have a modify button.
• Although the FAQ says it is possible to create subgroups, there are no examples of this on the site, so it isn't clear to me how this works. Given that the number of groups would likely become very large over time, they really need to be well structured to keep the site manageable and easy to navigate.
• The links to all types of content look the same, which can be quite confusing. For example, the search results can contain blog posts, groups, discussions etc, but the only way to tell them apart is with some small text - even though they are completely different in nature. I would suggest some bold icons to distinguish between them. Ideally, the information shown should also vary according to the content type.
• Pages within the different sections of the site also look virtually the same, which gives you no sense of where you are. The breadcrumbs help, but they don't seem very consistent (see below) and they're not very visual.
• The user search results show nothing except the username, which really isn't very helpful. Also, what if I want to search by job title, location, projects etc?
• The calendar is particularly unintuitive. You cannot click on a day to create a new event. When you click "Add a new event", the events details come last. Also, if you navigate via "Community > Calendar", the location when creating an event is shown as "Home > Create content" rather than "Home => Calendar => Create event". This makes it look like an after-thought to a CMS rather than part of a social networking application.
• The HTML editor in which I'm writing this post is configured to use double spacing. As a web developer, I know this is because the return key generates a new paragraph tag, but normal users don't know this. This is a minor point, but it suggests to me that there hasn't been any usability testing.
• From what I can see, there is no auto-save while I'm writing this. I can't find a spell-check either, so I take no responsibility for any mistakokes.

I've also taken a look at the Drupal code base and was similarly unimpressed. From what I can see, it's completely procedural, and seems to have a heavy reliance on global variables. This suggests it hasn't been updated since the launch of PHP5, which was many years ago. I was expecting to find a collection of classes with class diagrams to help me understand how they relate to each other, but instead it looks like a steep learning curve to read all of the documentation (which can't be printed or downloaded) and to examine each of the core modules. There isn't even any code-level documentation, such as PHP-Doc.

Sorry to make so many negative comments, but I'm really quite dissapointed. I'm a strong supporter of open source software and have made numerous contributions myself, but in order for open source to present a viable alternative to commercial software, the developers need to think like a business in terms of usability etc - both for the end user and other developers.

I sincerely hope Acquia will take some of these comments onboard, and I'll definitely check back when the next release is available.