Almost 3 years ago, I wrote a article called How Drupal Will Save The World. In that post, I talked about the importance of usability to Drupal. I also outlined how a more easy-to-use version of Drupal could lead to a shift in not only the way that websites are made, but it would also change the people who make them. Easier website creation is the key to changing the demographic of Drupal site builders.

I certainly wasn't the only person to notice that Drupal needed to be easier to use. And over the past 3 years, the Drupal community has made many efforts to improve usability and user interface. Probably the most noticeable user interface changes will be coming with the Drupal 7 release in the next few months.

Building a business

My article didn't really have any action items so much as it laid out several possibilities and some "what if" scenarios. Liza, Matt, and I had been mulling over this idea of improving Drupal usability for a while, unsure how to pursue it, when Liza began talking to Ed Sussman. At the time, Ed was president of Mansueto Digital running FastCompany.com and Inc.com. He came from a more traditional business and entrepreneurial background and he had ideas about how this could be turned into a business – a situation which could provide the financial foundation to keep the concept moving forward and allow a dedicated team really streamline the user experience.

Thus began a 2-year project with lots of user research, usability experimentation, interface wrangling, and basically rethinking Drupal's functionality and user interface from the ground up. Ed eventually left Mansueto and became the CEO of our new company. Lullabot became a co-owner of the company and invested many hours of development, guidance, and experimentation. We also brought in Karen McGrane, a prominent user experience and interaction designer whose resume includes the current New York Times redesign.

Most people don't want Drupal. They just want what Drupal does.

The result of all of this work is Buzzr, a complete reconcepting of Drupal. Buzzr is a user interface which sits on top of Drupal, allowing for easy one-click configuration, drag-and-drop layout changes, and simplified options. It's all Drupal underneath. We've just got a different interface. We flatten Drupal's learning curve by shielding site administrators and end users from Drupal's cockpit-like administrative screens.

Buzzr doesn't do everything that Drupal does, but it can do most things which most users want – and by building on top of Drupal, we've got lots of room for expansion with so many modules and functionality we can incorporate in the future.

Try it out

In case you missed the announcement, Buzzr went into public beta a few weeks ago at DrupalCon. You can visit Buzzr.com and start creating websites today. There is also a white labeled Enterprise Edition so that universities, corporate institutions, and other organizations can create their own customized web systems and give their users the ability to quickly create and edit their own Drupal sites using Buzzr's simplified user interface and hosting solutions.

As with most projects like this, we've got many more ideas and features that we'd like to add in the future. But for the time being, we're excited to have people check out Buzzr and start building some websites.

Update: We've posted a podcast discussion about Buzzr with a lot more information about how the project was built and how it works. If you'd like to find out more about the project, be sure to check out the podcast.