Open Waters Podcast Ep. 3: Improving Drupal's Admin UI With Cristina Chumillas

Welcome to Mediacurrent’s Open Waters, a podcast about open source solutions. In this episode, we catch up with Cristina Chumillas. Cristina comes from the design world and is passionate about front-end development. She works at Lullabot (though when we recorded this, she worked at Ymbra) and has been involved in the Drupal community for years, contributing with code, design, and organizing events. Her contributions to Drupal Core are mainly focused on front-end, design and UX. Nowadays, she's a co-organizer of the Drupal Admin UI & JS Modernization Initiative and a Drupal core UX maintainer.

Audio Download Link

Project Pick

 Claro

Interview with Cristina Chumillas

1. Tell us about yourself: What is your role, who do you work for, and where are you from?
2. You are a busy woman, what events have you recently attended and/or are scheduled to attend in the near future?
3. Which Drupal core initiatives are you currently contributing to?
4. How does a better admin theme UI help site owners?  
5. What are the main goals?
6. Is this initiative sponsored by anyone? 
7. Who is the target for the initiative? 
8. How is the initiative organized? 
9. What improvements will it bring in a short/mid/long term?
10. How can people get involved in helping with these initiatives?

Quick-takes

•  Cristina contributed to the Out Of The Box initiative for a while, together with podcast co-host Mario
• 3 reasons why Drupal needs a better admin theme UI: Content Productivity, savings, less frustration
• Main goals: We have 2 separate paths: the super-fancy JS app that will land in an undefined point in the future and Claro as the new realistic & releasable short term work that will introduce improvements on each release.
• Why focus on admin UI?  We’re focusing on the content author's experience because that’s one of the main pain points mentioned in an early survey we did last year.)
• How is the initiative organized? JS, UX&User studies, New design system (UI), Claro (new theme)
• What improvements will it bring in a short/mid/long term? Short: New theme/UI, Mid: editor role with specific features, autosave, Long: JS app. 

That’s it for today’s show, thanks for joining us!  Looking for more useful tips, technical takeaways, and creative insights? Visit mediacurrent.com/podcast for more episodes and to subscribe to our newsletter.