admin/foo URLs should be consistent

We are not changing paths unless critical in D6. These urls were named after modules initially. So there comes /admin/content/node and not /admin/content/node*s* and the like.

"/admin/content/node and not /admin/content/node*s* and the like."

I can agree with setting this as a 7-branch issue. However, this thread should focus on renaming the different paths to a more logic manner for end users, not according to the module name. Thanks for clarifying gabor.

In my opinion, admin/user nicely refers to "Administration >> User Management". admin/user/user, however, could be changed to admin/user/users, as you're in "Administration >> User Management >> Users".

sure, it's better than what we have today. But I still stand by that we should rename it to admin/users/users.

Because admin/users will deal with common rules/roles etc. against users :

* Access rules
* Permissions
* Roles
* User settings
* Users

This means you deal with all this things towards users and not a specific user.

this patch applies against several modules - so path.module as the issue specifications says is simply wrong. Biggest changes are made against user.module.

with this patch the path admin/user and admin/user/user will become admin/users and admin/users/users

*changed status*

fixed typo. I'm currently using this patch, and all seems to work.

Since this is really is just a minor change but has great impact to usability I'm marking this a critical. (we need more critical eyes on this certain issues as well..)

I think this is a good change, but shouldn't we try to be consistent with this? Afaik, everything is singular right now...

I reckon this would be good just with admin/user/users - would go with admin/user/roles for example. I'm not so sure about changing admin/user to admin/users. Either way, there's definitely inconsistencies with some of these paths, so bump.

admin/setting*s*
admin/user
admin/content
admin/build

Since admin/settings is now called "site configuration", we could probably change it to admin/configuration?

If at all, I vote for "config". Don't make those URLs even longer than they already are.

admin/build/block -> admin/build/blocks. That one gets me every time.

Promoting this to a "usability" bug.

admin/build/block -> admin/build/blocks

Welcome to the club... I've aliased it by now just out of annoyance. :)

What's the status of this issue? Maybe someone with knowledge about the core patch-naming could give an update.
On a related note, two paths that use plurals as of now:
/admin/build/modules and
/admin/build/themes

/admin/build/blocks really seems "consistent"

I had to change the "Component" tag, because there is no Usability component any more (or I am stupid/have turned blind), so I am setting this to path.module, because, well, it has to do with paths. Could be system.module just as well, though, I really don't know.

tstoeckler - I think it just needs the patch updating, most people seem to agree we need to standardise the URLs.

This is a tricky one to categorise, but since system.module provides most of the admin paths I'm moving it there - you can now tag issues with 'usability', which in nearly every case but this one is a better system for keeping track of these.

in an effort to keep this issue alive: I will try to attach an updated patch on the weekend, but as I have very (!!!) little coding knowledge someone would have to look over it then (with more attention than would usually be needed for such a minor patch, I suppose).
Just putting that out there.

tstoeckler, that'd be great. If you need any help with either code or rolling patches, you can always drop in to #drupal on irc and there's plenty of people willing to help.

well, the weekend is over and still no patch...
this is still on my mind though, working it's way to the top of my TO-DO list.
One thing to speed this up: Since I'm running Windows, I have quite some problems with command line operations. To actually know where to go I would like to know all the occurences of admin patchs in Drupal, so if someone could just
grep -r admin/ > foo.txt or something like that and attach it to this post, that would save me going through all the files manually....
In any case, I'll try to provide a patch soon!

Now I guess this can be considered exaggerated, but I created a Google Spreadsheet with all the current admin links and what I think they should be, to finally make all admin links consistent. Comments and discussion wanted:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p_hEOQXyl5m2cy_mYPvkVYQ

Quick summary of what I will change in the patch (coming soon!):
admin/build/modules
admin/build/themes
admin/user/permissions
admin/user/roles
each to the singular version.

Here I go, this is a straight search/replace of current HEAD. Hope testbot likes it... (works perfectly on my machine, though)

Forgot to change status...

I guess I need to reattach for the testbot to notice!?

The last submitted patch failed testing.

I seem to be having some problems with the patch rolling, I get this from time to time with TortoiseCVS. Could someone reroll or else tell me what is wrong so I can adapt the patch?! Thanks...

Something I just noticed:
The current patch uses for instance:

<a href="@permissions">permissions page</a> ... '@permissions' => url('admin/user/permission')))

Would it be better coding style to use <a href="@permission">???

Marked #99091: Admin URLs not consistent as a duplicate of this one.

in an attempt to bump this one.

New patch attached, which ONLY changes

admin/build/modules -> admin/build/module
and
admin/build/themes -> admin/build/theme

which was consensus during this whole discussion.

The last submitted patch failed testing.

Sorry for being a bit late on chiming in here, but why are we going singular? Webchick @ #14 asked to go plural....

I've made an update in the Google Document Administration Links outlining the plural changes we'd have to make. If anyone notices anything else, please be bold.

I was pretty bold I guess.
The document is now much easier to read...

It really boils down to SINGULAR vs. PLURAL, which could end in an endless bikeshed.
To my mind, for instance, the shorter a path is, the better.
Since I guess (from the fact how long this issue has lingered around) no one is really one the fence about this one, I guess it would be best if webchick and/or Dries hopped in to say which one they are going to commit and then someone can do the dirty work.

And now for a differing view: I don't see how URLs are much of a usability issue. Only geeks like us really look at URLs and try to make sense of them. Most users do not look at them, do not understand them and really shouldn't even ever need to seem. They should be opaque resource handles to some location or a resource, and nothing more.

So, based on that, we might as well improve the developer experience (DX) by making URLs be consistent with their modules, or something else developers will benefit from.

/me crawls back into hole. :-)

Hm.

In Drupal 7, we've been standardizing on single for all of our table names in core. Basically because it's always consistent and doesn't get us into weird English pluralization rules (goose vs. geese, sheep vs. sheep... apparently I forsee a big boom in animal named modules in the future :P) which makes it easier for non-native speakers to spot a word they've already seen before. Furthermore, it also makes it possible to do some neat ORM-style things like drupal_save('object_name') and everything just figures itself out.

However, all of that stuff is developer-facing.

For user facing things, I think it's more important to go with what is natural to them. And what is natural to them is if you click on a link that says "Administer blocks", the URL that that corresponds to is admin/.../blocks. I'm not crazy about the idea of renaming all of our pages to "Administer Block" because that is extremely awkward and dumb, so +1 on plural URLs.

Or, more accurately, +1 on URLs that match the page title.

Changed the spreadsheet as per #34 and marked the URLs that need to be patched bold, although with some URLs it is debatable, whether parts of the link title should be omitted, so it might actually be worthwhile to take a glance and drop a comment here or there.
I personally have no time to roll a new patch in the next few days, so anyone?!

This patch makes the following changes, as suggested in #35....

Should we split this up into a bunch of different issues so that it's not a >200K patch? Kittens are nice, you know.

Personally I think, since this is really just find & replace, it's rather easy to review (I just started on the first part), and since there's no real code change, so all tests passing really says enough on it's own, IMO. Just my two cents, though.

Many parts of this patch are duplicate of #408160: Normal users should not see the create content link appear by default in a menu called "Management".

Also, admin paths should always use the module name. We recently changed a few paths (e.g. admin/settings/filters => filter) that didn't equal the module name.

@sun:

Also, admin paths should always use the module name.

IMHO, this issue is challenging the very notion that paths should always use the module name, see for example webchick's comment #34: "Or, more accurately, +1 on URLs that match the page title."

I'm not entirely sure that this should be marked as a duplicate.

Match the page title? Seriously?

So in Drupal 8 the usability team decides that "users" should be called "members" now, because 99% of all web sites call it "members".

So we will rename all of our internal paths?

Also, which page title do you mean? The English, the French, or the German?

I somehow must have missed the patch that translates internal paths.

So in Drupal 8 the usability team decides that "users" should be called "members" now, because 99% of all web sites call it "members".

So we will rename all of our internal paths?

Well... yes (please excuse my ignorance, I'm still wet behind the ears when it comes to core).

As someone new to Drupal, I felt this issue raised some valid points: why is it admin/build/modules but admin/build/block (I'm going to manage my blocks, not just one). You call these internal paths, but I frequently hack the url to get to these pages because I don't want to click my way around, or because I'm lazy. When the usability team decides to rename users, I'd prefer the paths to be updated too. Having to go to admin/user to manage your members just seems unintuitive to me.

Maybe I should not have lifted the "Match the page title" quote out of webchick's comment (since the comment itself is a lot more verbose), but I'm not sure having the URL match the module name is the best way to go either.

I somehow must have missed the patch that translates internal paths.

Mmm, do I detect some sarcasm here? I did not mean to offend or annoy you, and I might not be aware of the history behind why things are/work they way they do. I just wondered if this issue should be marked duplicate just yet, as the entire point of this issue is to discuss whether or not it makes sense to change some of the URLs. (see the comment early on: "this thread should focus on renaming the different paths to a more logic manner for end users")

So if this does get discarded, marking it "won't fix" might make more sense... Anyway, that's just my opinion. I realize I might be out of my league here, so I'll go back to lurk-mode...