Usability UMN: Allow roles to be weighted
webchick - February 28, 2008 - 18:08
| Project: | Drupal |
| Version: | 7.x-dev |
| Component: | user system |
| Category: | feature request |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | active |
| Issue tags: | UBUserTesting2009, Usability |
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Description
In most cases, alphabetical lists of things make sense, but on admin/user/permissions, there's a logical progression of "classes" of users.
For example:
anonymous, authenticated, moderator, admin
makes more sense than
admin, anonymous, authenticated, moderator
So what about sorting this page by # of permisions each role has, so that anonymous user always ends up on the far left, and "admin" role always end up on the far right?
#1
Yes please.
Note also that we discussed changing "authenticated user" to "registered user" during the testing since no-one seemed to pay much attention to "authenticated". If that happens, then we've got less chance of the default ordering staying as it is when extra roles are added.
#2
Well, the weird thing about roles in Drupal, is that roles are really split into two trees, though this concept isn't fully exposed to the user. There are really two super-classes: anonymous and authenticated, and then the other roles all fall as subclasses of the authenticated role. I would think it would make more sense to split the columns into something like this.
| anonymous | authenticated ||------------|------------------------------------------------------|
| default | default | administrator | Extra Role 1 | Extra Role 2 |
Then the roles after default on the authenticated side would be sorted by their permissions. Maybe this is the wrong issue to post this suggestion in, but I figured I'd just through it out there, as I think the ordering of roles should really only be including the authenticated-type roles.
#3
Yeah that's a good point. Anonymous should always go on the left whatever happens, and probably Authenticated too.
#4
The importance of a role, and the place that role would most logically be put in a list of roles is nearly impossible to define simply from a count of permissions.
in your example, the goal is to get the roles to show in the order of:
anonymous, authenticated, moderator, admin
In every site I've worked on that order could not be defined by the number of permissions.
An admin user is one that can administer content and other things, the admin role has very few permissions. Admin Users are users that have admin and authenticated roles assigned to them
If you make use of the fact that a user in drupal is the sum of the permissions of all the roles they are in, you will see that there is no easy way to order roles on the page in a way that matches the logic of most sites (unless a weight is added to the role).
#5
I'm setting up a site that contains the following roles:
- contributor
- editor
- administrator
This gets displayed both @ user/X/edit and at admin/user/permissions in the order: authenticated, administrator, contributor, editor. I'd rather it shows up as anon, auth, contributor, editor, admin.
So... How about just add weights to roles, with nice clicky/draggy/droppy stuff on admin/user/roles like we have for taxonomy terms and such? That way we don't fix it on one page, but rather anywhere that roles are displayed?
#6
#7
See also http://drupal.org/node/256287 which i think would be another nice touch.
#8
This came up in the latest UB usability testing too: http://www.drupalusability.org/node/24