On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Jose A. Reyero <drupal@reyero.net> wrote:
That said, I think guidelines are fine, so if you want to set up this one as a guideline and find some consensus, ok. But enforcing guidelines upon module maintainers, when they think they have a specific reason to skip this one or this other guideline is bad (and mostly a waste of time).
I agree with Jose here. A UI guideline that I've heard about grouping items. * If a group is bigger than 12 consider splitting it * If a group is smaller than 5 consider merging it into another Obviously there has to be room for some compromises, but this provides a basic concept that we can apply to lots of areas like items in menus and the "Package" names at Admin > Site building > Modules (package names with only 1 or 2 items in the package area waste of fieldset). On a default site the "Site configuration" area begins at 14 items. Any proposal that pushes more items there immediately finds itself in violation of the guideline. Similarly, a module without many extension modules has no business creating packages nor creating top level menu items. If we look at the modules that started this thread: - Notifications / Messaging - Organic Groups - Panels On a typical site I think it's reasonable to assume that these modules will be installed alongside other modules that extend them and therefore they should provide their own top level navigation. More specifically: -Notifications / Messaging, as Jose pointed out, are part of a big package of their own which merits this. They also get more extensions regularly. - OG has it's own category of 58 items http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/90 - Panels provides many menu items itself which probably justifies this top level status without any sub-items. Perhaps it could be moved to some sub level like "Administer > Display" that could hold other "Display" related items. As Daniel proposed, we could push these top level items into an existing top level items and let the menus nest a level deeper. I don't think that will work. If you think our hierarchical menu system is good think about how you and other power users navigate Drupal's admin area: by mouse or by URL bar. We use the URL bar much more often which, IMO, points to a general "Menu system fail" (see https://video.devseed.s3.amazonaws.com/spaces_features_final.mp4 for recent evidence of URL bar navigation). Admin_menu "solves" this problem, but as much as I love admin_menu there is plenty of research that dynamic dropdown menus are too difficult for most users which means that simply pushing the menu hierarchy deeper is not a solution. ** Proposed guideline: If your module is part of a commonly configured package of modules consider creating a new top level menu under admin/ and consolidating related items under that menu. If your module will likely have fewer than 5 items at that level consider reconfiguring the screens to reduce menu items or merging it into an existing menu. Regards, Greg -- Greg Knaddison http://knaddison.com | 303-800-5623 | http://growingventuresolutions.com