Usability is certainly undervalued within most Open Source project teams. In fact, its generally hard to find any projects which actually have a dedicated team of members just looking at usability issues.
There's a bunch of reasons for this oversight - yes, they may be related to the core development teams of projects like Joomla coming from a pretty hardcore coding background... of course rapid development cycles don't help developers feel they have the time to themselves think about usability for too long (or better).
However, what I think is exciting is how this is all changing from a more grassroots level - as projects like Joomla grow in userbase and functional ability, more people from more diverse backgrounds are twigging onto shortcomings of the software. Those people are also more able than ever before to alter the code in sustainable ways to affect its usability.
The cited article @ http://www.playingwithwire.com/ pits Joomla and Wordpress together assuming that Joomla's admin side cannot be changed - from an interface standpoint. This isn't true and I think we'll see some re-workings of the Joomla administrative login become available, perhaps not from the core Joomla team though, soon.
In fact, with the aim of making using Joomla simpler, we've recently launched 'Seeding' (http://www.plantseedling.com) - a distribution label which has released a pre-packaged and configured Joomla distro that comes loaded with a slightly simpler admin interface.
Our first release of the Seedling distribution of Joomla wasn't aimed at redesigning the admin work-flow of Joomla but we've laid some groundwork for the next release which will see a complete re-organisation of the control panel and some admin features of Joomla! Stay tuned to our blog @ http://www.plantseedling.com/blog
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Usability is certainly undervalued within most Open Source project teams. In fact, its generally hard to find any projects which actually have a dedicated team of members just looking at usability issues.
There's a bunch of reasons for this oversight - yes, they may be related to the core development teams of projects like Joomla coming from a pretty hardcore coding background... of course rapid development cycles don't help developers feel they have the time to themselves think about usability for too long (or better).
However, what I think is exciting is how this is all changing from a more grassroots level - as projects like Joomla grow in userbase and functional ability, more people from more diverse backgrounds are twigging onto shortcomings of the software. Those people are also more able than ever before to alter the code in sustainable ways to affect its usability.
The cited article @ http://www.playingwithwire.com/ pits Joomla and Wordpress together assuming that Joomla's admin side cannot be changed - from an interface standpoint. This isn't true and I think we'll see some re-workings of the Joomla administrative login become available, perhaps not from the core Joomla team though, soon.
In fact, with the aim of making using Joomla simpler, we've recently launched 'Seeding' (http://www.plantseedling.com) - a distribution label which has released a pre-packaged and configured Joomla distro that comes loaded with a slightly simpler admin interface.
Our first release of the Seedling distribution of Joomla wasn't aimed at redesigning the admin work-flow of Joomla but we've laid some groundwork for the next release which will see a complete re-organisation of the control panel and some admin features of Joomla! Stay tuned to our blog @ http://www.plantseedling.com/blog
Cheers,
Qasim
(Principal @designguru.org)