Usability: User picture system is confusing

Perhaps soms stupid questins, but...
1) what theme are you using?
2) Are you getting any errors when uploading your image?
3) Is the file in the directory 'files/pictures' ? (With other words, did it really failed to upload it, or is it just not displaying it?)

Hope to hear from you soon...

this needs a change of title ;) and a version bump, as this wont get fixed till drupal 7.x

Oh, +1 for fixing this somehow. This has been a major thorn in my side for I don't remember how long.

It is indeed confusing and it sure has fooled me a few times.

I added a patch (against d7 head) which adds a description to the enable picture support option. The description also has a link to the theme's configuration page (of the default theme for the site). Since English isn't my primary language, feel free to suggest other texts.

Although it was tempting (very tempting) to add those enable user pictures for posts/comments on the theme configuration page also to the user settings page, I refrained from it because adding the same option on different pages (in different contexts) might be even more confusing. Someone might think they do different things etc. Furthermore, these enable user pictures for posts/comments do belong to the theme configuration page since it's something you want to configure on a theme to theme basis. So a simple explanation along with a link probably is the best thing.

+    '#description' => t("Picture support allows users to upload their own personal user picture or avatar. However, these user pictures aren't displayed by default for posts or comments until you enable them on your <a href=\"@theme_config_page\">theme's configuration page.", array('@theme_config_page' =>  url('admin/build/themes/settings/'. variable_get('theme_default', 'garland')))),

Good, but how about something like:

+    '#description' => t('Enable or disable support for user uploads of personal pictures (avatars) on the <em>My account</em> page. The display of avatars in posts and comments can be set on a per-theme basis using the <em>configure</em> links on the <a href="@theme-administration">theme administration page</a>.', array('@theme-administration' =>  url('admin/build/themes'))),

Or something similar. It would be nice to mention admin/build/themes/settings but is confusing to do so because of the need to cover the "override" behavior. Fortunately, it too is a "Configure" link so is covered in the above case. Kinda. And, I half-heartedly looked around to see what we've called this page in other places, but didn't find anything right away, so called it "theme administration page". I'm not positive that is consistent with other help text entries.

Also, the description in your patch is missing a </a>.

I disagree that those options should be there on the configuration page. It makes sense from a developer's point of view, but this isn't actually theming – which I consider to be HOW the page looks – but instead more WHAT is being displayed. I know the line here is blurry.

My point is really that the positioning of elements into the UI has not being carefully architected into a logical workflow. My concern is that we just bandage the problems with help text. We are still making our users (and ourselves) hop, skip and jump through hoops to find stuff and that's not good enough in my opinion.

In a bid to get an understanding of this problem (a problem that I currently don't know how to go about solving), I created a wiki page on groups.drupal.org to collect similar issues together. The aim is to try to see the workflow issue in a broader context. It's over here --> http://groups.drupal.org/node/12078

I pretty much agree with alpritt on this. It's only a theme issue architecturally, not from a user point of view. I'd like to see 'submitted by' options moved to node type settings as well.

At the very least, picture support should be on by default in themes, so if you need multiple themes doing different things, you have to go there to switch it off rather than on.

Agreed with alpritt. Let's fix the real problem instead of fixing the help texts.

Subscribing

Marking this asa duplicate to be merged into #222036: Usability: User picture system is confusing.

Duplicate of which?

Doesn't seem to be a duplicate, but this usability issue seems rather small - so moving it to Drupal 8. Its not really a bug anymore, now that Fields is in core. But moving it to a task, since we could create a better flow for this

I'm using the Pixture Reloaded theme. The pictures is not just displaying.

The User Picture system is absolutely terrible. Not just from a user standpoint, but also the developer base. There are more problems with this than just usability.

For example, getting just the URL for the user's picture requires copying some code from template_preprocess_user_picture.

I agree it's pretty bad. That's one of my major initatives to improve in D8. Although it's not *that* hard to get the URL. You have $account->picture (which is a file ID), so it works like getting the URL of any other file-managed image in Drupal.

Nothing to review.

User picture is not a field api, so I guess we're ok now.