[development] the past, present and future of drupal admin

[Kieran Lal]

On Jul 26, 2006, at 12:05 AM, Kristjan Jansen wrote:

> Can we sit back for a while and say: what is the reason to have  
> admin pages? what does admins do on those pages mostly?  Is it for  
> monitoring how your site is doing? Tinkering settings?  
> Administering content or users?
> (some answers are here:
>>>> http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp? 
>>>> SID=1425065&U=142506581557)

I think it's important to take a step back and figure out what  
administrators goals, and expectations are.  A lot of people talk  
about small UI improvements when trying to improve the administration  
user experience.  e.g. Have you seen the AJAX in WORDPRESS, OMG!!!!  :-)

However, our research indicated that people were spending upwards of  
40 hours in upgrading their site including debugging, managing new  
feature requests, training their users, and porting custom modules to  
new APIs.   We tried to help improve that with documentation:  http:// 
drupal.org/upgrade/tutorial-introduction

Our research also indicated that 83% of Drupal administrators looked  
for new features. So we did this: http://drupal.org/project/Modules/ 
category

The point is we need to get big pieces like improving the upgrading  
process or module categorization in place, particularly if they are  
not bound by the Drupal distribution development process, before we  
dive into small UI improvements.  Let me know if you want to  
collaborate on another set of interviews and a administration survey.

Cheers,
Kieran
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