I volunteered to help sarah_p with some tweaks to the PNWDS site, and this is my first time really dealing with COD on the admin side.
The request I was given was simple enough: "please toggle on voting for sessions". However, it took an insanely long time to figure out that the place I do that is under admin/build/flags/manage/session_vote, and then check "authenticated user" under flag access. :\
What I looked for, in order:
1) Fivestar module. No Fivestar module.
2) Vote Up/Down module. No Vote Up/Down module.
3) VotingAPI module. No VotingAPI module.
4) Anything at all with the letters "vot" in it on the modules page. I found Poll module and then finally the COD session module. Ah-ha!
5) Went to admin/by-module and looked for the settings page for COD session. Only permissions.
6) Went to the permissions page, but only stuff there about scheduling sessions. Hmmm.
7) Got stuck, asked for help.
What would've been AWESOME is if there was a single screen like this:
So that toggling this on/off was just a single setting, and it was clear how the event was supposed to progress (I could easily skip steps if I wanted too). Then all the stuff in the background could get added/removed as the event progressed.
Anyway, just an idea. But maybe some help text or something that throws people like me a bone. :)
Comments
Comment #1
ezra-g commentedI'm sorry to hear that you had a frustrating experience with COD!
It's true, it should be way more obvious *via the UI* how to enable/disable session voting (the steps are documented but that clearly doesn't cut it. Sadly, session voting is one area of COD that is somewhat half-baked.
In fact, you still have to do some config to the session moderation view to get the votes counts to display anywhere: (Patches welcome at #1142744: Display session vote totals to admins :) ).
Your screenshot is awesome, and I made a note of it over at #844540: Admin Dashboard for Session submission lifecycle, which I think is about the same general feature.
One minor complication of providing this UI is for sites with differing requirements around who should be able to vote. It's probably true that many sites want all authenticated users to be able to vote, and I'd be OK adding a big fat button like your screenshot to make toggling this dead simple for those sites. On some sites, only attendees should be able to vote, and there can be different ways that one is recognized as an attendee (having signed up for a particular node, having an "attendee" role).
One easy way to make voting config more discoverable in the UI would be to provide a "Configure session voting" link the Conference management menu that goes to admin/build/flags, and hope folks can figure it out from there. Do you think that would have avoided your hunt for the settings?
Feel free to ask questions in #drupal-cod - We'd love to identify improvements like this, and help COD users avoid the runaround like you experienced :).
Administrative note: I'm moving this to the "COD Support Modules" issue queue where we generally handle all issues other than ones specifically about the install profile and Drush make scripts.
Comment #2
japerryComment #3
mrconnerton commented