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By jefke33 on
Hello all,
I'd like to raise some issues about the user friendliness of Drupal for newbies, and more specifically the available documentation.
If you believe that Drupal is only for advanced php-savvy web developers, than you can go on and skip this post. If you think Drupal is for everybody, I'd like to point out a couple things.
First of all, I want to make clear that I am not an experienced web developer at all. I've made a couple of websites, I've used Joomla before and I did tinker a little with custom php scripts to get some things done the way I wanted. But none of those were clean solutions, they were merely workable. I ran into some limitations with Joomla, so I started looking around, and found Drupal. I like what I've seen so far. But I do think some things can be better as well.
If you're happy with the way Drupal behaves and what it looks like, right out of the box (or with a contributed theme), then using Drupal is pretty straight forward. The administration panel seems to be a bit contra-intuitive sometimes, but perhaps that's because I'm used to other systems which malformed my intuition. But it works great.
The main problem I see, however, are the limited ways of finding information on how to do things, if you want things to behave differently. I believe that drupal.org contains a wealth of information, but that it is hard to find information on specific topics. A big, BIG thing that is missing is an advanced search function. I really think that e.g. the forum desperately needs a function where you can search for specific keywords, within a specific subforum. Without that, a forum is more of a chat room than the information database it can be (and basically is). When people can't search for specific topics, they have to ask the most stupid questions again and again. And then the advanced users get sick of replying the same question again and again, and the newbie doesn't get an answer.
Furthermore, the module section could do with a separate search function as well. I think that the current way of subdividing modules in only one level of categories is too limited. Maybe it was alright when there were only 35 modules. But if you select content display, you get 406 different modules. It's impossible to find something you need in such a stack of modules, especially when you're new, and you know what you want, but you don't know how it's called. A tag or keyword function would help a lot. Now, there are many questions in the forum asking "what modules do I need for this and this", and what's worse, too many are not answered.
I know that these problems can (partially) be overcome by using google, but I don't think that people should be forced to do that. And it's not a very good solution either.
Another issue, maybe less urgent, but I'd like to mention it anyway, is the information for 'developers'. If you're not already 'into' Drupal, it is hard to find out what (functions) you need to get something working. Have a look at my post at http://drupal.org/node/248189 . I had been through the api-pages about the menu structure a couple of times, but I couldn't find how to do it. After dman gave me some more specific instructions, I knew what I was looking for, and the solution was a breeze, using the exact same pages. So the information is present, but it is not presented clearly. I don't know how this could be solved, apart from adding more descriptive information to the pages, and I am the first to admit that it can be due to my limited programming/php/... knowledge. But it _is_ a difficulty for a newbie like me.
By no means do I mean to criticize Drupal with all this, I just believe that if these points were tackled, Drupal would be much easier to use. They are probably not things a hard core coder/developer would want to spend time on (documentation etc.). And a more advanced search function would make a great addition to the forum module however, so it wouldn't be lost to the main Drupal project.
Cheers,
Jefke
Comments
A couple of quick pointers regarding advanced search
The advanced search (on the search results page) allows you to narrow down the results by forum and lots of other critera.
Likewise for modules, you can restrict the keyword search to just project pages.
--
Anton
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Great!!
That's exactly what I meant, indeed!
I'll have to admit that maybe I didn't look close enough to the results pages, as normally, I only scan over the results (being a bit disappointed). But maybe, if I did, I will not be the only one. Because before I posted this, I _did_ check again whether there was really no option within the forums for an advanced search.
Could it be due to an approach slightly different from what we expect, based on our experiences on other websites/forums/...? This again confirms my believe that (as with the information) everything _is_ available, but it's hard to find. Maybe the advanced search function could be made to jump out more?
But if I'm the only one struggling with this, then it's all good of course. Let's hope it is that way...
Cheers
Working like google
Unfortunately something like this would be incredibly resource hungry because of the way that Drupal works. The system is built on the taxonomy module filtering key terms and providing content based on the result set. On site as large as drupal. org this system is almost always overloaded. The pure number of nodes makes taxonomy very intense. The search however is in its own seperate table structure and is in its own set of tables built on the input of the entire site.
So to do just a forum search would mean first building a search index using what is return from the taxonomy that is used to build the forum. Then you would have to modify the search module to only search through this index and not the one that is used for the entire site. I other words the taxonomy system would be acting as a filter for the search system. But this is actually the way it should be.
Now there is another way of doing things but it is not very intuitive nor is the usability implemeted very well. The search module does allow you to search by node type and filter by taxonomy inside the search index. But it allows this only in the "advanced" search mode. This search requires a certain type of syntax when doing a search. The user gets help with this via a form but it is still very user unfriendly and takes practice before you can actually find anything. Also on drupal.org there is no direct link to the advanced search so you have do a normal search in order to get to the link. This means that most users will miss the link afer being frustrated by a bad search. The collapsed form does not help anything much.
To get a good search you have to first click on advanced. Then use the phrase box. use the phrase "book module" (without the quotes)
Choose a category. I recommend that you use the version of drupal rather than anything else.
Then check "forum topic".
Now you should get a really good result. At least better than the one you would get by entering the same phrase directly into the generic search form.
This is the way that it is done on other software like vBulliten but you get the advanced search immediately and it is expanded.
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Thanks for the hints
I see the search function is pretty powerful indeed, once you find out how to use it. Great advice, thanks!
Too True
I think you are pretty much right on all points. I've also been slowly learning things with Drupal and there's no doubt that getting answers to specific questions is difficult. You're point about the modules is important.
It can be very frustrating to scroll thru the modules looking for something interesting. There are various ways to filter, but there should be more summary info on the page. For example when you browse by category there should be the date it was last updated on the screen and its version information should be there as well so you know if it is "recommended" for the version you are filtering on or not.
Another thing that would be great for noobs like me is some kind of section in the developer's area for how to setup common IDEs so that they have code assist features working with the drupal api's. A set of Doxygen output for drupal APIs that one could download would be great too. The APIs on drupal.org are ok, but they are formatted differently from how most developers are used to and this makes it harder to browse thru.
It would be great to also have some kind of "subscription" capability for forums, projects and issue trackers. If you post a question to a forum or have an issue in a project it would be great to receive an email if it is updated. Its pretty frustrating to have to keep checking manually.
In general I really think the Drupal.org site and its documentation is pretty decent so these are just things I've thought of to make it even better.
beren erchamion
http://tarnaeluin.wordpress.com/
Good to know
Good to know that I'm not the only one...
The more time I spend at the documentation part of the site, the more I get the feeling that it is something organic, a bit like the rest of the internet. There is no nicely laid out, well defined path to follow if you want to learn the inner workings of drupal. You just have to read a lot and follow links throughout the documentation, trying not to despair when something isn't totally clear, as you'll probably find an explanation a bit further on. The advantage of this is that, once you're through with it, you probably end up knowing a lot more then when you would have read only the things that you're interested in at that moment. The big disadvantage is that it is not really an efficient way of learning, and that it takes more time before you get things done. I fear that, as Drupal grows, it will even get harder for a newbie to find his way through the documentation. But I fear as well that there's no easy solution. (except for buying that Drupal development book, maybe...)
The advanced search function _does_ help however...
This is basically why Typo3
This is basically why Typo3 never made it big in the states. First of all it is a monolith structure that takes months of reading to get a handle on.
It has all the things that Drupal is trying to do , views, cck, acl, extension automation, registry... bla bla ad infinitum. There are some great books but since no Americans have taken on Typo3 almost all of the texts are in german. As it grows Drupal is heading down the same path. The only advantage it will have is english. but even this advantage is not good enough to stave off the ever increasing learning curve. Within every version less and less people know how Drupal actually works. This is the reason that pay for development is becoming more popular.
Documentation does help but it also will suffer as those who are documenting will soon forget how things work. they will depend on developers for explainations. Developers are notiously terrible at explaining things and those that are exceptions are the ones that are too busy because they are writing a book.
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...
I agree, and so do others. Another challenge is that even if you do find that handful of modules which appear to do exactly what you want, it's difficult (especially for new people) to find out which ones are well maintained, of good quality, and which ones are halfway to abandoment.
There's a lot of work going on in these areas, see http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-org-redesign-analysis (esp. the discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/3447), http://groups.drupal.org/new-release-system, and http://groups.drupal.org/module-metrics-and-ranking. If you have something to add to those discussions, please do so! I haven't followed this in detail, but as I understand it, a lot is pending on a major re-write of the project module, which is used for all projects (modules, themes, and translations) on drupal.org. There's also a new (and somewhat contriversial) site for module reviews, see http://drupalmodules.com/, as well as http://groups.drupal.org/node/9321 for some of the discussion.
If you have suggestions for information to add, please open a new documentation issue, and/or consider applying for editing rights to the handbooks (see http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation for more information).
I am fairly new here as
I am fairly new here as well. I rarely use the built-in search on any site. It is much easier to just use the search engine bar in my browser and search Google, Windows Live, Yahoo, etc... and find the information. If the results are too broad, I can easily restrict my searches to a particular domain using the big boy's advanced search. I can do phrase based searching and even exclude keywords that I don't want. A lot easier than trying to deal with the intricacies of a site's specific search engine.
On my own Drupal sites I am thinking of completely ditching the internal search engine and just using Google Custom Search for them.