On Thu, July 27, 2006 12:05 pm, Earl Miles said:
Modules that come with Drupal core put their settings largely in the 'site settings' block. *However*, systems that also have large-ish administration pages put their settings near those administration pages.
As I watched Drupal move through 4.6 to 4.7 and actually 'split' some administration tasks between settings and regular administration tasks, my brain hurt.
For one, how do I, the user, know which as an administrative task and which is just a setting? Unless I'm already familiar with the system, I don't. Even if I'm already familiar with the system, I may not, because the division may be purely based on how the data is stored, and only a developer is really going to know that.
Shining example, or The One That Killed Me:
Menu system. menu.module in 4.7 launches with a 'Primary Links' block, and you put links in it for them to become primary. But you can change which block that is. But where do you change it? That's right, now where the primary links block is, but...yes, in the settings.
Talk about a common question on #drupal-support, too. 'Edit Primary Links' takes you to admin/menu but if you want to just get rid of the link, you actually have to go to admin/settings/menu ...
So, coming back around, my personal belief is that systems with large administrative pages should have their settings with the administrative pages. Systems which have, basically, only settings, should have their settings in the Settings block.
Wait, didn't you just say exactly what you just said is bad? That some things are under admin/settings while others are under just admin, and there's no clear reason why for any of them?
Additionally, what I was trying to set up is that contrib modules should have their settings in the 'modules' block. If for no other reason than because when you enable new stuff, chances are it'll either create a new system (ecommerce is something I would expect to just have its own administrative block) or it will put itself into the modules section.
Random data point: For whatever reason, when my brain says "I want to change the settings for the foobar module", my hand clicks the modules link. Why? I think it's because my brain thinks modules -> settings rather than settings -> module. I'm not sure how common that is, but after more than a year my hand still won't pay attention and go where it's supposed to. Which brings up yet another question: Should settings be clustered by the module that provides them in the first place (admin/settings/foobar), or by the type of activity to which they belong (admin/content_types and so forth)? Right now we do a little of each, which I can't see as a good thing. --Larry Garfield