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

[Dries Buytaert]

On 26 Jul 2006, at 09:05, Kristjan Jansen wrote:
<snip />

> I have no preference formed, but gut feeling says the "ideal admin
> page" should contain a smart mixup of these different ideas above

I think that is where we are heading.  Maybe we are not going in a  
straight line, but we'll get there eventually. :)

> - should all settings existing in Drupal belong under "Site settings"
> or should some of them belong in the logical task clouds named above?
> Content management has loads of different settings: for nodes, for
> comments etc. Same goes for user management, there is also config
> stuff under stats etc.

Usability is defined by how easy it is for users to build a mental  
model of the site and its organization.  A mental model lets you  
figure out what would happen in a novel situation.  In my view of the  
world -- after having received many complaints about the settings  
being scattered -- it's easier to build a mental model if all  
settings are grouped together.  As Kristjan said, it's all about  
being able to discover settings.  I strongly vote for grouping all  
settings, which is what I did with the settings page rewrite ... With  
Earl's patch there are essentially two places to look for settings:  
the settings block, and the related category's block.

> 4) sort out the "tabs mess" what have happened. Although it was a hard
> struggle to get it working, it was obvious from the start that
> open-endedness of menu tree and strict UI limits of the 2-level tabs
> can never properly work. Over the time poor tabs got misused and
> mistreated, the notorious "tabs inside tabs" in content filters and
> several other places, abusing the "tab title should be a task-specific
> verb like "list", "configure"" rule. Add primary and secondary links
> as "tabs" too and it gets even more messy.

I agree, people have been abusing tabs and by doing so, attribute to  
the problem.  I think, however, that the tabs-issue belongs in a  
separate discussion/patch.  Let's focus on practical improvements for  
the administration patch that Earl is working on.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/