You might remember we mentioned that we were going to kick off an activity we call ‘Pimp Your Admin’ at the recent Drupalcon conference – we have a few interesting screencasts already and now we’d like to invite you to join in!
One of the great things about Drupal is that you can bend it to your will – get it to do just about anything you need it to do. Same goes for it’s administration interface (admin).
Before we get to work on the Drupal7 Admin, we’d love to see what you out there have done to make the Drupal Admin System do what you need it to do, or just to work better for you and your project.
Here’s how we want to do it – simply take a little screencast, it seems to take us about six or seven minutes – and walk us through your admin system and show us what you’ve done, even if it’s just something tiny – to make Drupal work better for you.
You can check out some examples that others have done at the Drupal7UX YouTube Group then once you’ve recorded yours, upload it and post it to the group so we can take a look. (Of course, if you’d rather host it elsewhere, you can just leave a link to your preferred location in the comments below (thanks Brandonian, we’ve got a note of yours!)
We’re really looking forward to seeing your work and to see if some interesting trends start to emerge!
update: for those who ask, we’ve been using Silverback to record our screencasts. If you’re a Mac user and interested in User Experience you should have Silverback. It’s great and ridiculously affordable.
Cobalt is great. It’s a module that builds a local searchable database of menu items, nodes, users etc. And it learns as you use it. There is a screencast at http://cobalt.goodn.eu/sites/default/files/screencast.mov
The interface is now geared towards Mac/Quicksilver users, but that could be changed, Spotlight and Google Quick Search Box comes to mind.
No screencast, just something I find myself always changing on a new Drupal setup: setting the ‘Create Content’ and ‘Admin’ navigation links to expanded by default. No point making users click more than necessary…
There is a admin theme called RootCandy that isn’t too bad at trying to create some structure to the admin area:
http://drupal.org/project/rootcandy
http://www.beniso.net/drupal.swf
Certainly not the best screencast, but I hope it will help to improve Drupal’s UX!
I am a 4 week old Drupal noob. I got started by installing the Acquia Stack. It came with Admin Menu enabled.
I will NEVER use Drupal without Admin menu enabled, ever. The first thing i do in all my test installs so far is go and enable admin menu and enable it to float “always top”.
I can’t imagine using Drupal without it. I also sit here and think how miserable some people are because they don’t know about it.
For this not to be included in D7 is a crime!
My 2 cents.
Elijah
I was giving a talk on Drupal Accessibility last night and was told about some of the AJAX enhancements that were being discussed here.
There was general concern around the table for the accessibility implications of this. Now if everything’s being built with a Progressive Enhancement approach, it should be fine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
However, it’s a challenge enough to get changes into core that allow for people with disabilities to become content authors.
A shiny new interface shouldn’t stop people from participating in a social network.
+1 on admin_menu.module.
For the less privileged users (editors, operators of certain functions) we sometimes build a small role based block/menu with only links to the relevant admin items. This can be particularily useful by directly pointing to a “list terms” af a vocab in taxonomy, and naming that link e.g. “Administer color categories”.
What I like to say in general about changing interface from my experience: 2009 seems te become a big year in the Netherlands, in terms of Drupal adoption by businesses and governments alike, based on D5/D6 user interface. Please do not make a major overhaul in a way that no one comfortable with d5/d6 without ICT knowledge must be retrained from zero.
But, Im in to UI progress ;)
We just launched a custom dashboard/module for our own site. We have too many content types – which fall into certain categories. Also, no one could find any of their content because permissions are restricted.
SO – i started up this module, with a mind to make it work on all my drupal sites. So far there’s some special dashboard pages & functions — but also there’s some special views for users content at the bottom of the page.
so for our main content uploader likes it!
screenshot, module-in-dev and further discussion here:
http://www.artmess.org/content/pimped-our-dashboard
An option to choose different type of interfaces like a control panel interface to attract other cms users who got used to control panels interface and a classic style with less loading access times