[drupal-devel] settings inconsistencies

[Steven Wittens]

Dries Buytaert wrote:

> 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.
>
I'd like to point out that this particular issue has been addressed 
partially by the "access control" patch. I think we need to look at 
other ideas for the admin interface, but in the mean time, moving things 
around a bit can be a great improvement in the mean time. 4.6 is going 
to be around us for a while, it would make sense to tune the admin 
interface in its current incarnation too.

Steven Wittens