Frando (Franz Heinzmann) wrote:

Fist of all, great work, Earl!

Dries Buytaert schrieb:

...

Note that we're well aware that there is room for improvement so feel free to submit patches that build upon Earl's work. It's not perfect, but it is certainly a big step forward. For example, we could use some help making the administration page a tad sexier.

Hmm, concerning the look&feel of administration pages:

I think we should create a new administration theme. The time of bluemarine is - in my eyes - over.

I completely agree. While I don't think a new admin theme will happen before the code freeze, I have every belief that a good, sexy, solid admin theme *is* doable, and the question is finding the right person to design one.

It's difficult to have a sexy administration page within bluemarine, because bluemarine is not in particular sexy. And this is not about funky-web-2.0-ish-ajaxy-whatever stuff but mainly about usability. Sometimes, Ajax *can* improve usability a lot, sometimes not (therefore it would also be great to get jquery into core, but that's another topic)

Yes. One can do a *lot* just by creating color balance, setting up negative space properly, and ensuring everything is positioned in a way to make the eyes flow from data point to data point. It improves the speed the data is read and it reduces the 'fear factor'.

Many themes are great themes for viewing a website, but are often not designed to be used with an administrative backend. So I think drupal should *provide* a theme that's just perfect to be uses with the administration center. Site builders can then decide wether they want to use their own theme or administration theme for the admin center or the drupal default administration theme.

Is it currently possible to "map" a theme to a path (admin theme to admin/*) without using contrib?

Look carefully at the administration page setting in the new admin area. It lets you choose the administration theme, which now defaults to bluemarine (because it's at least sane). There is currently nothing in the way of creating a good administration theme, and if anybody feels they 1) are a talented designer and 2) can write clean HTML/CSS, then now would be a great time to start. I think a real admin theme will require more patches to core, just to make a lot of the administration pages better/more themeable. I'm all for that, as I work my way from page to page that I particularly think needs love. But I am not a designer so much as trying to improve the design AND set up features the way I think they need to be.

Bèr Kessels wrote:

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 16:37, schreef Earl Miles:

...

I completely agree. While I don't think a new admin theme will happen before the code freeze, I have every belief that a good, sexy, solid admin theme *is* doable, and the question is finding the right person to design one.

I really beleive this a case of "Just Do It".

making such a theme has been on my todo for a long time, but I lack he time/money (and pressure) to actualy get to it. :)

I maybe can help out with the pressure. }|->> Cheers, Gerhard

Well, I wouldn't recall that 'pretty', but clean??? yeah, 'clean' it was... Op 4-aug-2006, om 15:51 heeft Adrian Rossouw het volgende geschreven:

how about we just steal the markup from drupal 4.3's admin section ?

that was clean and pretty.

On 8/4/06, Gerhard Killesreiter < gerhard@killesreiter.de> wrote:Bèr Kessels wrote:

...

Op donderdag 3 augustus 2006 16:37, schreef Earl Miles:

...

I completely agree. While I don't think a new admin theme will happen before the code freeze, I have every belief that a good, sexy, solid admin theme *is* doable, and the question is finding the right person to design one.

I really beleive this a case of "Just Do It".

making such a theme has been on my todo for a long time, but I lack he time/money (and pressure) to actualy get to it. :)

I maybe can help out with the pressure. }|->>

Cheers, Gerhard

I would say the biggest single improvement for any dedicated admin theme is removing all the extraneous blocks, navigation, etc from the page and only providing the common site header (or a minimal version of it with logo and site_name), and the admin menu links. -Rowan

What about using the old CivicSpace administration theme as a starting point? It would need to be cleaned up a bit, but it had minimal headers, few blocks and Chris had a good admin color schema going. Farsheed --- Moshe Weitzman <weitzman@tejasa.com> wrote:

Rowan Kerr wrote:

...

I would say the biggest single improvement for any dedicated admin theme is removing all the extraneous blocks, navigation, etc from the page and only providing the common site header (or a minimal version of it with logo and site_name), and the admin menu links.

-Rowan

i agree. i would actually like for theme('page') to be enhanced so that any page can declare itself as block free. this would override settings in block admin. the use case is panels.module - http://drupal.org/project/panels ... there might be other ways to achieve this too.

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Op 5-aug-2006, om 8:58 heeft Bèr Kessels het volgende geschreven:

Op vrijdag 4 augustus 2006 20:56, schreef Farsheed:

...

What about using the old CivicSpace administration theme as a starting point? It would need to be cleaned up a bit, but it had minimal headers, few blocks and Chris had a good admin color schema going.

This is what I tried once. But it is far to hard-tied into the CS bundle. IT is far more work to extract the relevant parts then to write one from scratch.

Plan: During the OSCON I want to host a themeing workshop. We could build this around such an admin theme? So that the end of he workshop brings us a first admin theme?

I'm probably jumping in a bit late into the discussion, but am I understanding we want a separate admin-theme for drupal? Why? One or two years back Adrian and I were convinced that merging the administration into the normal layout of the site, was the way to go.. Steef

Op 5-aug-2006, om 10:55 heeft Bèr Kessels het volgende geschreven:

Op zaterdag 5 augustus 2006 10:52, schreef Stefan Nagtegaal:

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I'm probably jumping in a bit late into the discussion, but am I understanding we want a separate admin-theme for drupal? Why? One or two years back Adrian and I were convinced that merging the administration into the normal layout of the site, was the way to go..

We are talking about a *theme*. A theme just like any other one, but one that can be enabled (using sections, or some simpler code) on your admin area. Okay, and how are you going to handle the block placements in the admin theme? I mean, I don't think you use the same blocks in your sidebars when your admin-theme becomes active, then the normal website layout?

Wouldn't you think it becomes weird in some kind of way to understand that your site changes once you are administering your site? And where does the administration section begin? How are we going to separate administration and public-shared site? On what base? Steef

...

Wouldn't you think it becomes weird in some kind of way to understand that your site changes once you are administering your site? And where does the administration section begin? How are we going to separate administration and public-shared site? On what base?

Hardly. Many people have been confused, coming from other CMS's, that the admin section *is* part of the site.

Indeed. MovableType and Blogger has /never/ themed their admin section to match that of the public side. I regularly use sections.module to split off my public side with my admin side. -- Morbus Iff ( take your rosaries off my ovaries ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus

On 5 Aug 2006, at 09:52, Stefan Nagtegaal wrote:

I'm probably jumping in a bit late into the discussion, but am I understanding we want a separate admin-theme for drupal? Why? One or two years back Adrian and I were convinced that merging the administration into the normal layout of the site, was the way to go..

Steef

I'm also jumping in a bit late too, and having only used Drupal on 3 fairly small sites may not have the full picture but... - I find it useful to have the admin as part of the front end site - My clients find it useful and easier to get their heads around the idea of navigating to content and hitting 'edit' As others might find it a requirement :-) http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource1/ index.html?ca=drs # Separation of content from presentation # In-place commenting on content # In-place editing of content - The ability to override when an 'Admin' theme is present otherwise falling back to the front end theme is appealing. Why not make the admin theme selectable from the settings? Mark http://drupal.org/user/62940

Why don't we invite some people to give it a try? For a small but talented webdesign company, having the default Drupal core theme might worth a lot in marketing value. I'm pretty sure you'd get various leads out of it. :) If not, you'd still be the hero of the next Drupal release. ;-) Rather than keeping this on the development mailing list where hardly any designers are to be found, why don't we open this up a little? :) For example, why don't we invite the Alex and Arto brothers to come up with: 1. a new default theme for Drupal core and/or 2. a better adminsitration theme and/or 3. subtle refinements for bluemarine Alex won the Slashdot redesign contest and they are already familiar with Drupal. Alex: http://www.macbert.com/ Arto: http://bendiken.net/ Their company: http://www.makalumedia.com/ Of course, every one is welcome to propose or submit a design but maybe this should be discussed amongst designers rather than developers. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/

Dries Buytaert wrote:

I'm pretty sure you'd get various leads out of it. :) I think you're overvaluing leads vs eating and paying the rent :)

Even for a team of people doing the things you've suggested well would take the best part of a month. I don't suppose Jeff or Ted could give us a ballpark figure on how long http://twit.tv took including the designers time?

Alex won the Slashdot redesign contest and they are already familiar with Drupal. Slashdot were offering a loaded MacBook Pro.

Of course, every one is welcome to propose or submit a design but maybe this should be discussed amongst designers rather than developers. Well, interface designers maybe. But since all of these things are possible in themes the themes list and group would seem to be adequate.

-- Adrian Simmons (aka adrinux) <http://adrinux.perlucida.com> e-mail <mailto:adrinux@perlucida.com>

On 05 Aug 2006, at 19:19, Adrian Simmons wrote:

Dries Buytaert wrote:

...

I'm pretty sure you'd get various leads out of it. :) I think you're overvaluing leads vs eating and paying the rent :)

...

Alex won the Slashdot redesign contest and they are already familiar with Drupal. Slashdot were offering a loaded MacBook Pro.

Only for the winner, that is. If they hadn't won, then they wouldn't be able to eat? :) Clearly, some people are willing to take the risk, or actually enjoy a challenge. That said, Robert Douglas, at one point, toyed with the idea to organize a theme contest. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/

Dries Buytaert wrote:

2. a better adminsitration theme and/or

I don't think we should have a separate administration theme, but a separate administration themeable function, in parallel to theme_page() and theme_maintenance_page(). This could solve the blocks issue by making a hard-coded administration block region which is only used by the administration themeable function. -- Neil Drumm http://delocalizedham.com/

Why would you need this? You can easily define an "admin" blocks section and fill your admin-only blocks in there. Regular users don't see it as they don't have the permissions to see the block. Optionally, you can restrict these blocks to only show up on certain pages with Drupal's built-in features. 2006/8/5, Neil Drumm <drumm@delocalizedham.com>:

Dries Buytaert wrote:

...

2. a better adminsitration theme and/or

I don't think we should have a separate administration theme, but a separate administration themeable function, in parallel to theme_page() and theme_maintenance_page().

This could solve the blocks issue by making a hard-coded administration block region which is only used by the administration themeable function.

-- Neil Drumm http://delocalizedham.com/

Moshe Weitzman wrote:

Rowan Kerr wrote:

...

I would say the biggest single improvement for any dedicated admin theme is removing all the extraneous blocks, navigation, etc from the page and only providing the common site header (or a minimal version of it with logo and site_name), and the admin menu links.

-Rowan

i agree. i would actually like for theme('page') to be enhanced so that any page can declare itself as block free. this would override settings in block admin. the use case is panels.module - http://drupal.org/project/panels ... there might be other ways to achieve this too.

Excellent idea! Sometimes it makes sense to have "single purpose" pages amongst the more general pages on a site. Admin seems like a good candidate, and providing a way for other modules to specify their pages this way is a good option to give to developers.

Stefan Borchert wrote:

And maybe I can help with tow little suggestions [1]. The styles are not ready yet (icon needs work, display in IE, etc.) but it could be used as a base idea.

[1] http://dev.borchert.cc/drupal/style/

Nice, though the Druplicon is kind of aliased. Maybe it's because he's meant to be on a white background. The colors are pretty nice, and I like the white-on-blue with semi-shadowed border look. It's fairly simple.

Frando (Franz Heinzmann) wrote:

I think we should create a new administration theme. The time of bluemarine is - in my eyes - over.

Admin theme: 1. Make hook_menu() able to define menu blocks. Use that for the devel module and the admin menu. 2. Add a admin_page() themeable function which is called on anything under /admin. This would be parallel to theme_page() and theme_maintenance_page(). Add a hard-coded administration block region to contain the admin menu made in step 1. 3. Put admin CSS in a separate CSS file from drupal.css. 4. Remove the admin theme setting. Bluemarine refresh: 1. Replace the flat Druplicon default icon with the cell-shaded one. 2. Throw in a tableless layout. 3. Saturate the light blue colors a bit. 4. Add whitespace. 5. Improve the fonts a bit. 6. Repeat in 1-2 years or as needed. All HTML changes (with the exception of the tableless layout) should not be implemented in our default theme. They should be implemented in the default themeable functions. No, I'm not volunteering for this since I need to be reviewing your patches for the next month instead. -- Neil Drumm http://delocalizedham.com/