The personal disquiet of

Mark Boulton

January 8th, 2010

Announcing Project Verity

As you may know, Leisa Reichelt and I have been work­ing for the past year or so with the Drupal com­munity; first on the redesign of Drupal.org, then the User Exper­i­ence pro­ject for Drupal 7. Since then, I’ve been using Drupal more and more. My com­pany has hired two Drupal developers, we use Drupal 6 every day to build new sites and applic­a­tions for ourselves and for our cli­ents. Through­out all of this work, there is one thing lack­ing: Drupal does not do a great job at provid­ing an admin for con­tent creators.

Dur­ing the D7UX pro­ject, we defined two per­so­nas: Ver­ity and Jeremy. Let’s focus on Ver­ity for a moment. Ver­ity is a con­tent cre­ator. She’s not a developer. She doesn’t care how Drupal works, she doesn’t need to know Drupal ter­min­o­logy. All she needs to do is man­age her con­tent. Then she leaves work and goes home to do other things. Ver­ity needs the admin of Drupal to help her do her daily job. Cur­rently, Drupal doesn’t do a great job of that. That’s where Pro­ject Ver­ity comes in.

Pro­ject Ver­ity launched today. Leisa and the team at Mark Boulton Design are team­ing up to design a paid/premium admin theme for Drupal 6 designed to make you look good and your cli­ents feel great. From the Pro­ject Ver­ity site:

The Ver­ity Theme (a paid/premium admin theme for Drupal 6) will allow you to hand over a web­site backend that you can feel proud of, that has a great User Exper­i­ence and that con­tin­ues the great design exper­i­ence you’ve cre­ated for the front end through to your cli­ents exper­i­ence of man­aging the web­site. You develop the site in whatever theme you like, then when you’re done devel­op­ing, switch to the Ver­ity theme to cre­ate a user exper­i­ence spe­cific­ally designed for con­tent cre­at­ors like Verity.

I’m very excited about this little project. 

We’re design­ing in the open — as we did with the two other pre­vi­ous Drupal related pro­jects. We’re doing this at the blog at Pro­ject Ver­ity, and you can keep up to date by fol­low­ing the Twit­ter account: http://twitter.com/projectverity

For more inform­a­tion about Ver­ity, read today’s announce­ment and find out if Pro­ject Ver­ity is for you.

7 Responses to “Announcing Project Verity”

  1. prisca said on: January 8th, 2010 at 8:47 am

    Mark,
    really look­ing for­ward to fol­low­ing this pro­ject. I’ve star­ted to use Drupal more and more but do find it very unfriendly com­pared to oth­ers… so will be curi­ously await­ing news ;)

  2. Andy Walpole said on: January 8th, 2010 at 11:11 am

    I’ve just been play­ing around with the Root Candy admin theme and that’s bet­ter organ­ised than any other I’ve come across.

    I’ll keep my eye on little Miss Ver­ity. The idea of hand­ing over a Drupal 6 site to a cli­ent and expect­ing to mas­ter the admin­is­tra­tion sec­tion is laughable.

  3. Daniel Nordstrom said on: January 10th, 2010 at 9:42 am

    Wow, that’s fant­astic. I’m really look­ing for­ward to the release of this theme and will def­in­itely pur­chase it if it works well.

    Lack of a user-friendly admin theme is _the_ reason why I’m lean­ing towards Word­Press, Expres­sion­En­gine or even a bespoke sys­tem whenever suitable.

    Keep it up. Any idea when you’ll release it?

    Daniel Nord­strom
    @mrnordstrom
    mrnordstrom.com / nintera.com

  4. Ryan Le Roux said on: January 13th, 2010 at 9:19 pm

    I cur­rently use Drupal for my site. I love the fact it’s open source (free).

  5. Jon Gibbins said on: January 18th, 2010 at 4:49 am

    This will be a great step for­ward for Drupal, and some­thing it has needed for a long time now. I’ll be check­ing it out the next time I have my head in Drupal mode. Good luck with it!

  6. Triet Trinh said on: January 30th, 2010 at 8:30 pm

    i like Drupal.

  7. dodo said on: July 14th, 2010 at 2:12 am

    I won­der if this is still in development

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    Hello. My name is Mark Boulton. I’m a designer, an author, a speaker and I run a small design agency where we work with lovely cli­ents and pub­lish books as we go. This is my blog.

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