[drupal-devel] Admin theme?

[Chris Messina]

On 5/28/05, Steven Wittens <steven at acko.net> wrote:

> I'm still in the "no admin theme" camp. Consider this: how popular would
> Wikipedia be if their edit interface worked and looked completely
> different from the regular site?
> 
> People who look for a blogging tool automatically want a separate admin
> interface, but this is only a small part of our audience.

It's not secret that I'm in the separate admin UI camp. But I can also
see how the integrated option makes sense in some cases. And so I've
suggested many times that we *enable* the option of theming the admin
section more easily -- and that Drupal develop some guidelines as to
what belongs in the admin section of a web CMS and what doesn't.

The delineation I've suggested is to consider what features should be
community facing and which shouldn't. For example, throttle is not
something the community should care about, but an admin obviously
needs to use that tool. The editing UI is *not* an admin function,
it's a community maintenance feature; the UI should be the same as the
rest of the site.

In my adminbar, I precisely mapped out which features belong to the
admins and which don't. It's far from complete, but could serve as the
basis of discussion on what is admin and what is not.

The blogger's argument about theming is well understood. That
WordPress has hundreds of high quality themes illustrates that there
is something intrinsically easier about theming WordPress. I would
venture that it's not only a less complicated application, but it also
removes the difficulty of theming the admin forms; and with the same
stone, knocks out the documentation bird making it easier to document
WP's many admin interfaces.

Dries, there is a split in the community about this topic and none of
us are wrong. But we need to know whether we should expend effort on
this and if it's something that you would support. I'm of course in
favor of it, but we need to stop debating it and make a decision one
way or the other.

Chris