[drupal-devel] settings inconsistencies

[Dries Buytaert]

Gabor Hojtsy wrote:
>> They were moved to give them greater attention. Admins were missing 
>> that feature entirely. They did not think of profile setup as Users => 
>> Configure.
>>
>> I think this is a matter of taste, and possibly not worth debating.
> 
> It is a matter of consistency I think. Now we have object focused admin 
> interfaces (eg. content, where you can set content options, review 
> content, etc). Similarly for comments. And then we have task oriented 
> admin interfaces, which means basically anything under admin >> 
> settings. Chx also pointed this out before, and it seemed that Drupal is 
> going to the object based direction to utilize tabs (local tasks related 
> to objects) instead of cluttering the menu. Now this change goes in the 
> other direction.

The inconsistency of the administration interface (and most notably the 
location/organization of the settings) is a major issue.  It is worth 
debating and worth improving for Drupal 4.6.  After all, usability 
improvements are still being accepted.

For example, why are the profile settings under 'admin > settings' but 
the input filters directly under 'admin'?  Can anyone answer that question?

On a related note, this month I observed two colleagues installing and 
configuring their own Drupal 4.5.2 site independently from each other. 
Both had problems locating settings and both reported that they found it 
confusing that enabling a module "adds new settings at what seems to be 
random pages".

Furthermore, at one point they both enabled the search module and they 
both reported (again, independently from each other) that "their 
visitors could not search the site while they could".  Turned out that 
neither checked the permission page after enabling the search module. 
Even after a few hours fiddling with Drupal, they did not expect an 
'access search' permission to become available.

-- 
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/