With WordPress justifiably gaining ground as a fully-fledged content management system rather than just something to get a half-decent blog together, and the continuing popularity of Joomla (despite Joomla in my experience being an ultimately extremely unmalleable solution for anything but the most simple sites), it’s brilliant news that top design firm Mark Boulton Design are in the midst of giving the Drupal website a much needed redesign.

As most people’s first experience of Drupal, the project’s home site has always been functional more than a beautiful example of design, and until the last few months, few of the available themes for skinning your Drupal website have compared to the quality and choice available for WordPress and Joomla in particular. Faced with the critical decision of choosing the correct CMS for a project, WP and Joomla have always offered in my opinion a ‘friendlier’ face from the outset. Unfortunately there’s maybe been a tendency to go for something that looks good out of the box, rather than choose the most suitable platform and a skilled Drupal designer to create a good-looking theme on top.

The new drupal.org designs should go a long way to both addressing this first impression of the project and challenging the image of Drupal as a ‘developer’s platform’ rather than a designers’ one. It still looks ‘like Drupal’ – but cleaner, more approachable and like something you’d want to be involved in.

Thousands of Drupal developers across the globe have contributed their time skills to the project, hopefully the new-look site and redesigned architecture that promises to make search a lot easier than the present system will encourage more designers to get involved too.