[drupal-devel] A collection of usability problems

[Chris Messina]

On 9/27/05, Larry Garfield <larry at garfieldtech.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 September 2005 03:40 am, Bèr Kessels wrote:
> > On Monday 26 September 2005 22:37, Chris Messina wrote:
> > > If your customers are confused by the admin section looking different
> > > from the node editing pages, all you have to do is change the test
> > > that looks for /admin in the directory name or also include
> > > /node/*/edit.
> >
> > So, you are saying: if you don't like foo, open up your texteditor and
> > change the sourcecode?
> >
> > Weren't you the one that was so extrmely against enforcing any kind of
> > programming on users?
>
> Heavens no.  An admin theme that requires code editing to remove would be
> insanely bad. :-)

The point is not to force people to edit code. What I was saying was
that you can edit the code *for now* until a UI is developed to
determine which sections of *your site* belong inside or outside of
the admin area. This has been my proposal all along and I'm rather
tired of rehashing this discussion.

We decided last March to separate out the admin section of Drupal to
use a consistent theme
(http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-devel/2005-03/msg01249.html).
Little action has happened to get this into core.

I'm not advocating that Drupal dictate what is or isn't admin -- only
that there exist a UI that allows you to determine what functionality
should be part of the site "control panel" that looks consistent
between Drupal sites (or can be overriden at the theme level).

I wrote code for CivicSpace to do this because in the CivicSpace
distro, it always made sense to have an admin section that didn't
include the node edit pages (since that was decided to be a community
function instead of an admin function).

I noticed that there is another thread on the mailing list about this
topic, so I'm going to go check that out, but I would appreciate it if
you would characterize my proposals in view of the history of my
advocacy -- not in view of one simple email written quickly.

Obviously I don't advocate for UIs that exist only in the code. But as
it is, Drupal is still far too code-centric. Consider the fact that
there is still not a decent built-in theme editor in Drupal. If you
want to pick on code-centric UI issue, tackle that one.

Chris