On 26 Jul 2006, at 09:05, Kristjan Jansen wrote: <snip />
I have no preference formed, but gut feeling says the "ideal admin page" should contain a smart mixup of these different ideas above
I think that is where we are heading. Maybe we are not going in a straight line, but we'll get there eventually. :)
- should all settings existing in Drupal belong under "Site settings" or should some of them belong in the logical task clouds named above? Content management has loads of different settings: for nodes, for comments etc. Same goes for user management, there is also config stuff under stats etc.
Usability is defined by how easy it is for users to build a mental model of the site and its organization. A mental model lets you figure out what would happen in a novel situation. In my view of the world -- after having received many complaints about the settings being scattered -- it's easier to build a mental model if all settings are grouped together. As Kristjan said, it's all about being able to discover settings. I strongly vote for grouping all settings, which is what I did with the settings page rewrite ... With Earl's patch there are essentially two places to look for settings: the settings block, and the related category's block.
4) sort out the "tabs mess" what have happened. Although it was a hard struggle to get it working, it was obvious from the start that open-endedness of menu tree and strict UI limits of the 2-level tabs can never properly work. Over the time poor tabs got misused and mistreated, the notorious "tabs inside tabs" in content filters and several other places, abusing the "tab title should be a task-specific verb like "list", "configure"" rule. Add primary and secondary links as "tabs" too and it gets even more messy.
I agree, people have been abusing tabs and by doing so, attribute to the problem. I think, however, that the tabs-issue belongs in a separate discussion/patch. Let's focus on practical improvements for the administration patch that Earl is working on. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/