The widely anticipated release of Open Atrium, created by the fantastic team at Development Seed, attempts to bring Drupal into the world of intranets, allowing different teams to have their own conversations. As soon as it was released, I, along with other pingVision developers began evaluating it as a potential tool for communicating with our clients.

Yesterday was the first day of usability testing in Baltimore. The focus of this particular usability study is around Drupal 7.

3 patches

Beginning with Drupal 7, we applied three patches yet to be committed in order to test the functionality provided. The vertical tabs patch is one of the biggest user-interface improvements. In summary, if javascript is enabled, it combines all of the fieldsets on node/add and node/edit forms (such as comment settings, menu options, path alias) into a single, toggleable interface which really simplifies the form to add content. It is a wonderful addition and in our tests thus far, users are un-phased by the change and find the tabs very intuitive.

Early last week, the oldest issue (node/8) in the drupal project was finally "fixed". After nearly eight years since the issue was posted, users in the next major Drupal release, Drupal 7 (predicted for release later this year), will be able to cancel and delete their own accounts.