Dries Buytaert

The Interaction Design Association (IxDA), representing an international community of interaction designers, has recently announced plans to re-launch the ixda.org website using Drupal. For those that don't know, the IxDA is a 10,000-strong organization of design professionals. The IxDA supports almost 70 local groups, hosts conferences, and provides education and outreach in support of its mission to advance interaction design. It speaks well of our project that the IxDA selected it as the base for its new site, and it marks a tremendous opportunity to attract more design professionals to Drupal, to advance Drupal's usability, and to get many more themes developed. This could be big.

The announcement stated, in part:

... our IxDA infrastructure initiative has selected Drupal to provide the technical platform for our website redesign project. We evaluated a range of content-management systems, both hosted and unhosted, proprietary and open-source, and kept returning to Drupal for a number of reasons. We love that it's an open-source system, representing a philosophy akin to our own "un-organization". We appreciate that it has a large developer community, comprising professionals who can help us make our vision into reality. We also like that it has many existing modules to serve our needs along with great capability to be extended. Additionally, we have IxDA members on our team with the capability to design and build at least several key planks of our new online home.

Additional details about the IxDA's plans for their new home are available on the IxDA Board Blog, including a PDF outlining the release plan. The IxDA has put out a call for a qualified Drupal developer to serve as a technical resource and advisor throughout the life of their project. An IxDA group has also been created on groups.drupal.org to host discussions about IxDA's Drupal-based platform. Exciting!