What is this? There's hardly anything here, and what is here makes no sense at all!
Read This First
Questions, comments, requests, discussion, polite abuse, etc. are confined — for the moment, as we design and build this (see bootstrapping, dogfooding) — to the thing I've called "Actions" but will have a better name eventually.
Any or all of the above are particularly welcome here:
I am not in charge of this project. I have strong opinions on what is wrong with the Web, and a pretty good grasp of the basic principles of how to approach fixing those problems one website at a time. I have a vague idea of the things that we might do based on ideas and perennial frustrations I have heard expressed by others in our group. But this will be as much an unmitigated disaster as nearly every other website I've put together over three decades (!) without others setting the directions and priorities, and getting actively involved.
I have no desire to spend all day every day sitting in front of a computer producing something that, when done, will disappear without a trace and bring no benefit to anybody. The Commonwealth pays three and a half thousand dollars per term to ensure I have ample opportunity to work on those sorts of projects. What I would like to do here (and for that matter with the remainder of my life in general) is collaborate with my brilliant and lovely friends on a creative project that produces something fun and useful.
All ideas and feature requests are welcome, all bug reports are useful, though some are more useful than others (see Simon Tatham's definitive recipe for maximising that utility).
As for where we are now, yes, I agree:
- This looks awful and uncannily like Katy's personal site.
- What is here includes all sorts of personal information that shouldn't necessarily be publicly circulated.
- What is here is immensely confusing and jumbled.
At the moment I'm concentrating on getting the content model(s) (pretty diagrams here) and the underlying tech settled, and then building outwards, starting with what's most useful/urgent/easy. Nobody without a user account can see anything here at the time of writing (I hope; correct me if I'm wrong), and little of what you can currently see will be visible to the general public at the point where we have something to show to anybody outside our little group. This is currently a toolbox containing tools which have no use except to build more useful tools.
Also, you're currently seeing a whole lot of admin interface that is only for development purposes, and will not even be installed on a live publicly-accessible site, but also components that most people who have user accounts should never see. I haven't been pedantic about locking much of this down yet, as it's a terribly fiddly chore. Drupal has three logically necessary user roles: "Anonymous user", "Authenticated user", and "Administrator", to which I have so far added "Member" and "Editor", and this list will probably get longer. Also, user accounts are associated with (sub-)organisations and projects, and it's possible (indeed likely) that access to content will need to be further finessed by those more fluid relationships.
So what you're experiencing now is analogous to the sensory input that overwhelms a newborn infant. Relax. With time and experience, synaptic pruning will occur, the chaos will start to look like order, and the urge to scream the place down will dwindle significantly.
That said, I am not a graphic designer, and you are looking at Drupal's default theme. Personally, I don't like it. It wastes a lot of screen space and is altogether too clever for it's own good. You are welcome to look through the list of off-the-shelf-Drupal visual themes, but that is a thankless task, and quite premature. Form doesn't (and arguably shouldn't) always follow function, but it's not a bad rule of thumb. And as we've only a vague idea (well, I don't know about you) of what the functions should be at this stage…