WYSIWYG in Drupal 8 is going to rock, simple as that. Practically all annoyances, complications and other stuff we have had to endure In Drupal 7 and earlier has been fixed. Read all about it and also watch Nate Haug's DrupalCon Portland 2013 session about the improvements here.

Unfortunately Nate also revealed that Drupal 8 will still automatically delete files when their usage gets zero. That is a bad thing and I'll explain why I strongly believe that.

Sooner, not later, you will end up in the Issue Queue on d.o. Its practically unavoidable if you want to get the most out of your relation with Drupal.

The more involved you get, particularly as a code developer or themer, you will find that you spend more and more of your time working on and jumping around between issues. The list of issues you are active in and/or monitoring is constantly growing.

At this point you have turned the issues queue into: Your Workplace!

I saw this tweet flashing by in my stream today:

What immediately caught my eye was Drupaleros, the Spanish word for Drupal User. Its such a great word and just sounds great.

Or what do you say about:

We are the Drupaleros!

Awesome isn't it?

If you’ve been around the IT business a couple of decades, I’m sure you also remember what happened whenever Microsoft released a new Office version. They received a storm of user complaints! It was about the same thing every time: Microsoft had focused on adding shiny new features while neglecting to fix the existing ones. For every version office simply became more and more bloated.

I spend a lot of my time in the Drupal issue queues, working with others in the community, collaborating on fixing problems and improving both core and contributed projects. For me this is very rewarding; both because I learn a lot, but also because of my passion for making things easier to use.

Its two and a half month since my community initiative Drupal SBUI made its announcement and a lot has happened since. I would like to take this opportunity to give you an update and overview of things. Personally I am very excited about the progress we already have made.

This post is also great timing due to that yesterday we got our first community collaboration project when the maintainer of the Fill PDF module asked if we can help out with improving its UX. Its something we really look forward to working on.

What is Drupal SBUI?

I have, shamelessly, stolen the headline from the second slide of Jeff Eaton’s keynote (see embedded video at the end) at DrupalCamp Toronto November 17th. For me, this quote encapsulates one of the biggest challenges sitebuilders have, namely being able to construct amazing UX and usability for users, and particularly for those users that work with the content. The whole keynote is about that, the UX and usability for users and Jeff is, as usual, spot on about everything.

Yesterday, Michael Keara, Doug Vann and I announced the formation of the Drupal SiteBuilding Usability Initiative, or Drupal SBUI for short. We have been working on this for over two months are are thrilled to now make it public to the community.

Yesterday I published the Why not Drop IE8 support for Drupal 8? post and it got some really great feedback in the comments. Thanks for that, its always nice to hear good arguments as well as tips of where to find more information about something.

In this post I would like to follow up on those comments. First though lets start with a look at the market share Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) has and how it has developed from its height in April last year.

A couple of days ago Google announce that it will drop support for Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) for Google Apps. Gmail is included in that too. After November 15th, 2012 users of IE8 will see a warning message with a recommendation to upgrade their browser.

Two days ago Mozilla released Firefox 15 with the promise it would come with a solution to the memory leaks especially add-on extensions caused. I have eagerly waited on its release and updated as soon as it became available. Since then I have kept one eye on the Processes tab in the Windows 7 Task manager, monitoring how much memory it reported Firefox using.

Today, August 28, Firefox 15 will be released and I haven't felt so excited about a new browser release for a long time.

Why you ask?

Simply because it promises to kill the zombies that puts a voodoo on memory consumption. For heavy users like myself, that has multiple windows with tens of tabs open at the same time, this will lead to Firefox using a lot less memory and in many cases be much quicker to work with. The lower memory footprint will of course also affect the whole computer and thus allow me to have more applications open that all will work faster.

Today DrupalCon Munich opened with the training and CxO. OK, there have been some sprints going on over the weekend too, but the real opening was today.

I arrived just after 11 in the morning and as you can see of the photo there is not much to complain about the view from the hotel room on the 20th floor.

By now, from reading the previous posts in this series, I hope I have been able to give you a better understanding about the various tasks and challenges a Drupal site builder is faced with. In this post my ambition is to demonstrate some of the limitations I have found that makes the process extra challenging, as well as adding to the Drupal learning curve.

The other posts in this series are:

In the last post I showed you how central the site builder role is when planning, building and running a website. It virtually have bi-directional communication needs with every other role involved. In this one I will focus more on some of the main challenges a site builder is faced with in this process. That said, welcome to the third post of six in this series. The previous and upcoming ones are as follows: