Jeffrey Veen: Making A Better Open Source CMS: A rant from Jeffrey Veen about Open Source CMS usability. I agree with some of his points, but disagree with his characterizations. In other words, he makes the choices sound very easy. In Open Source CMS development (as in any other development environments that have a widely seperated user base) not every user wants everything to be spoon fed, just like every user does not want to have to understand the inner working and settings for a “pingback”. There is a delicate balance that has to be struck. (Though I agree that many developers tend to forget the differences between the developer model and the user model). The one item in his list that I am striving towards (for WordPress) is to write task-based documentation first. Spolsky and his paper on Technical Specifications come to mind. Via: UI Designer
