-----Original Message----- From: Dries Buytaert [mailto:dries.buytaert@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 9:59 AM
Looks nice and professional. (This discussion probably belongs on the theme development mailing list.)
I'd like to see a dashboard in Drupal 4.8/5.0.
I'm not convinced that this would be a good idea -- at least, not in the forms I've seen it so far. While I think there's no arguing with the idea that Drupal's administrative interface needs work to achieve WordPress levels of usability, there are a couple of fundamental issues that need more than a menu and page reshuffling to solve. 1) A streamlined and user-friendly administration UI is very task-dependent. Community blogs, Ecommerce/Storefronts, Community sites, News Portals, etc. CAN all be shoehorned into a single workflow, a single dashboard, but I think the experience will suffer greatly. WordPress has the luxury of focusing exclusively on blogging. If you look at its administation dashboard, it combines features from four specific Drupal modules, one of which lies in conrib (trackback). It's perfect for a your-blog-at-a-glance overview, but almost useless for other types of sites. 2) Drupal modules have absolute flexibility in how they manage their own configuration. They can add a new hierarchy of menus. They can sit under the /admin hierarchy, or add a block full of links that's only visible to permissioned users. They can add their options to other screens. They can form_alter their way into any other UI, if necessary. Achieving the kind of streamlined, polished admin UI that WP demonstrates -- while also working with contrib modules -- is its own herculean task. We don't have the luxury of shoving everything into a 'plug-ins' page. I think the real solution lies in optimizing drupal core's adminsitration interface for four key tasks: site setup and configuration, basic batch operations on content, user permission management, and viewing statistics. Providing a default 'dashboard' that gives access to those tasks, and supporting a system where other dashboards could be swapped in to replace it, would let use focus on the basics. Those additional swap-in dashboards could be optimized for the needs of specific sites, rather than just adding more-and-more-and-more features to the 'core' dashboard. That's my thought. It comes with no code, and thus is worth less than the existing implementations, but I worry that pursuing a 'monolithic redesign' for the admin screens will gain us very little if it tries to be all things to all people. --Jeff