[drupal-docs] How to design your Drupal site to be useful and usable

[Boris Mann]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:59:16 -0800, Kieran Lal
<kieran at civicspacelabs.org> wrote:

> It's a Wiki so feel free to hack away, old versions are there for me to
> retrieve.  The basic story is that after seeing our navigation system
> savaged by usability experts and generally assuming that it wasn't our
> fault I went home and sat down with the Drupal documentation and eight
> ounces of vodka.  I quickly realized the beauty that is Drupal and the
> sadness that not RTFMing brings.

I read through this. It seems to be about doing the information
architecture and design for a particular site. This will necessarily
be different from site to site. It wasn't clear to me where the
difficulties were in actually configuring this, just that users didn't
know information architecture and hence didn't know how to structure
their sites.

One of the items that came out of DrupalCon was the guidance that the
entire admin tree is likely going to be removed from the Navigation
block, and only be displayed for users that have access to something
in the admin tree. I've found in every custom site I've done that I
tend to disable the Navigation block and create my own custom menus.

Making task oriented menus is a matter of configuration. The
CivicSpace distribution might want to pre-load a lot of this content.
Role-based block visibility is (I think) somewhere on the development
list as well, which will make this easy.

In any case, more feedback and discussion is always good. What is most
useful for the larger, technical community on Drupal.org is specific
changes that can be reflected in code. This may mean someone more
technical reviewing feedback and determining if it is a configuration
issue (which many are, and this can be handled by distributions) or if
core changes are required. Also, this would definitely be in the realm
of the new Usability and Feedback working group.

Cheers,

--
Boris Mann
http://www.bryght.com