On boxesandarrows.com you can find a good article about the use of patterns for the user interface. The staff of Yahoo! wanted to make sure that reinventing the wheel regarding the best user interface within Yahoo! would stop by facilitating the designers with some sort of a “knowledge blog”.

In this blog they could post their ideas, standards, rank them and hence create a more consistency, predictability userinterface across the Yahoo! sites. They describe in depth how the process from their functional requirements towards implementation went and how they made sure everybody would join in and use the tool. Yahoo considered different technologies (Blog applications, CMSs, Groupware and Wikis) and implementations (Movable Type, pMachine, PHPNuke, PHPCollab, Tikiwiki and yes: Drupal).

And after they ranked all techniques and implementations, Yahoo! choose for drupal: "Ultimately, we chose Drupal because of its breadth of capabilities, powerful taxonomy, and extensibility"

The article features some nice workflow charts and screenshots. It is nice to see that a big search engine like Yahoo! is using Drupal internally.

Lets hope more companies will follow, especially from the non-ICT sector and that they will find out or know that giving their own modules back to the community, will benefit all