[drupal-devel] A collection of usability problems

[Larry Garfield]

On Friday 23 September 2005 04:18 pm, Dries Buytaert wrote:


> > I think Ber might have meant only catching pages with the simple
> > admin/*
> > regexp. That indeed would be confusing since not all admin
> > functions are
> > caught by that and it would appear random to a user. It pretty clearly
> > needs to be an all or nothing decision I would think.
>
> So what doe you mean with an 'all or nothing decision'?  What exactly
> does that mean in terms of what pages to theme differently?
>
> If I give you 2 months to think about this problem, will you be able
> to come up with a perfect solution?  No, you won't.  There is no
> perfect solution.  Due to Drupal's highly dynamic nature, the
> distinction between user-mode and admin-mode will remain blurry,
> regardless of the regex you throw at this.  That, and it is often a
> matter of preference.

Which is why I'm not wild about admin-only themes.  As an option perhaps, but 
definitely not as the only/standard way of doing it.  Is editing a node 
administrative?  What if it's your own node?  Someone else's?  Will the theme 
sometimes change and sometimes not?  How drastically does the theme change?  

WordPress, for instance, has all of its administrivia physically separate from 
the user site, so having a dedicated admin theme makes perfect sense.  
Drupal's functionality is not even split into "admin" and "user" in the first 
place.  We have different roles with varying levels of access and control.  
There is no clean place to split admin and non-admin, unless we completely 
reorganize the entire system.  Of course, then we'd lose most of the power of 
Drupal and turn into Mambo. :-)

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
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