On 5/28/05, Steven Wittens <steven@acko.net> wrote:
I'm still in the "no admin theme" camp. Consider this: how popular would Wikipedia be if their edit interface worked and looked completely different from the regular site?
People who look for a blogging tool automatically want a separate admin interface, but this is only a small part of our audience.
It's not secret that I'm in the separate admin UI camp. But I can also see how the integrated option makes sense in some cases. And so I've suggested many times that we *enable* the option of theming the admin section more easily -- and that Drupal develop some guidelines as to what belongs in the admin section of a web CMS and what doesn't. The delineation I've suggested is to consider what features should be community facing and which shouldn't. For example, throttle is not something the community should care about, but an admin obviously needs to use that tool. The editing UI is *not* an admin function, it's a community maintenance feature; the UI should be the same as the rest of the site. In my adminbar, I precisely mapped out which features belong to the admins and which don't. It's far from complete, but could serve as the basis of discussion on what is admin and what is not. The blogger's argument about theming is well understood. That WordPress has hundreds of high quality themes illustrates that there is something intrinsically easier about theming WordPress. I would venture that it's not only a less complicated application, but it also removes the difficulty of theming the admin forms; and with the same stone, knocks out the documentation bird making it easier to document WP's many admin interfaces. Dries, there is a split in the community about this topic and none of us are wrong. But we need to know whether we should expend effort on this and if it's something that you would support. I'm of course in favor of it, but we need to stop debating it and make a decision one way or the other. Chris