On 7/26/06, Kristjan Jansen <kristjan.jansen@gmail.com> wrote:
5) It's all about _discovery_ of settings, right? How does it work right now? I would imagine couple of ways:
(snip)
Possible improvements (some of them silly ;)
(snip)
-- for recently enabled modules' menu item add red "new" markings so they stick out while browsing the admin pages. It can be problemsome though: enabling many modules in the same time takes you to go reddie hell. But this is just a suggestion for direction not a concrete proposal
I agree that "discovery of settings" is a big problem for Drupal administrators at the moment. The way that the menu structure "grows" within the admin section of a Drupal site is extremely non-user-friendly, IMO. All Drupal modules - core or contrib - currently add or modify a whole bunch of pages to the admin section of the site (where 'pages' includes all types of menu items, e.g. normal items, tabs/subtabs, callbacks, etc) as soon as they're enabled. But they don't notify the administrator at all! They change the structure of the site, and they don't tell the site admin about it. This is not good. How can we expect poor old Joe Admin to know where to look? I like the idea of the red "new" markings on newly added menu items. I also have another idea, that takes a slightly different approach to solving the same problem. It is currently best practice for modules to list all of the functionality that they offer, and all of the menu pages for using the functionality, in the 'admin/help' section. Why not take this help text, and make it stand out to the user when a module is first enabled? For example, the path module is a core module that is disabled by default. We could make it so that when the path module is first enabled, a series of 'messages' are displayed to the administrator on the main 'admin dashboard' page, each message listing a new piece of functionality, and a link to the page where it can be used. See my attached mockup image for an idea of what I'm talking about. In the mockup image, my vision is that when the user clicks anywhere within the message, they are taken to the page that is being linked to in the message, and the message itself is deleted. The user can also delete the message without following the link, by clicking the 'X' icon in the corner. Of course, this vision would involve a lot of fancy AJAX in practice. If 37Signals were developing the next version of Drupal, I imagine that this is how they'd do it. ;-) Cheers, Jaza.
