[drupal-devel] two minor usability issues, introduced recently

Bèr Kessels berdrupal at tiscali.be
Sun Sep 25 08:58:20 UTC 2005


I just upgrded to HEAD and very much suprised to find two rather unfortunate 
usability iissues introduced:

MBstring support? This seems to Just Work, why do I need a collapsed form 
element telling me it works? Joe user (and I) should not be bothered with 
form options that are no options.

RSS in the global settings is a bit an unfortonate choice. first of all, the 
amount of items set gloabally: 
1) why cant this simply respect the amount-of-nodes global setting? 
2) RSS without nodes (in core) is non existing. Thus this is no common 
setting. 
Therefore I think this RSS setting should live under settings >> RSS settings, 
so that contribs can add LOCAL_TASKS or so. The current placement requires 
any other RSS setting (by a contrib) to be placed elsewhere. Scattered 
settings are one of the mayor usability issues in Drupal.

I really think we must get such changes past at least some usability test 
before they hit core. PAtches are tested and tweaked on comma, tab and spaces 
level, yet usability is often simply ignored. Herein lies a great opportunity 
for the community, IMO. 

Ber






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