The news about WhiteHouse.gov switching to Drupal made the rounds.

Sure, Obama isn’t the first president to use open source: it was probably Clinton. Nor is this the first time Drupal takes the CMS spotlight of American politics, if there is such a thing: Dean ran his hugely innovative and relatively successful 2004 campaign on a Drupal site, four years ago. And it wasn’t news that the Obama likes Drupal either, change.gov was a Drupal site from its inception.

However, this remains an important announcement not because it’s news, but because it reaches well beyond the circle of Drupal or open source CMS aficionados. Sure, your sister may still not know what Drupal, a CMS or even open source are, but your next client might. Your pointy-haired boss will now lend you and ear when you start your pitch for a new intranet CMS with a headline like this.

It’s not really news, but great news.

Some of our customers even came to see us because 8 Points advertises as a Drupal specialist. They knew about Drupal or WordPress and were ready to bet their business on a solution based on them. It’s obvious that both CMSs get a lot of lip service from the press and gained many friends in high traffic places.

I personally used both since they were far less stellar. My first public Drupal site was migrated from SPIP in 2001 to Drupal 4.7. And I remember using Cafelog/B2 before WordPress existed. The fact that they are now darlings of the open source community is great news for 8 Points and for web site creators around the world.

Last night I talked to the Entrepreneurs Meetup group about “The ABC of User Testing – Organize your design reality check on a budget”.

With the welcome interruptions and Q&A at the end, it lasted about 90 minutes. The 10 people strong “crowd” seemed genuinely interested in the subject and was very engaged. I must do this more often :-)

Download the presentation slides as a PDF here:
abc-user-testingkey.pdf (PDF, about 500KB)

Throughout the years, my activity in DTP, graphic design, web, product management, user experience consulting and other domains built up into huge pile of stuff. It’s all in a folder on my hard drive called Ye Old Archive, where the remains of a few hundred projects collect dust. I have logos, web designs, functional specifications, GUI designs and a few abandoned business projects. Most of them deserve to be displayed, some of them I am quite proud of, while other are probably not worth a second look.

This is probably the 10th time I am building a portfolio site. The problem with the previous versions was that I concentrated too much on the packaging of the portfolio itself, instead of the actual content. This time, however, I let WordPress do the hard work as I concentrate on the actual projects.

Check out some of the most important recent works in the Portfolio section.

The largest community site for Romanians in France. The site was created in 2001 on a SPIP CMS, then migrated to Drupal in 2001. Many public or custom Drupal modules are used throughout the site. The site was originally called Franţa România, but was recently renamed to Filiera Franceză.

One of the largest cinema and TV sites in France. Besides a new branding, the redesign added more interactivity, social features, automated workflows and a very powerful administration area.

Cafe.com is a casual games social web site. The first version of the service used a Windows application to play games, chat, purchase items and edit the profile. I on site with the Beijing team to redesigned the application skin and improve the usability.

Cafe.com is a casual games social web site. The site has a comprehensive avatar system and a large selection of games. I created the original style for the avatars and worked with the design team on implementing it. I was also part of the game design team and contributed to the design, gameplay specification and content for many original casual games.

Cafe.com is a casual games social web site. I created the original branding, designed the web site and wrote most of the content. As the product manager for the service, I was also in charge with the communication through the official blog.