Usability: comment settings form

Oooh, nice! I *much* prefer the comment-settings-after look.

The biggest drawback to a complete revamp of this comments settings form is indeed the fact that if comments are switched off, site admins can still make comments and read comments, even though regular users cannot see or create comments. this is a no-no. More to come from me on this topic in just a bit, but I think we as a community agree that this form needs help, and what Flobruit has done here is an important first step. Yayy!

+1 from me to this patch.

[Continued from above]

The biggest drawback to a complete revamp of this Comment Settings form is indeed the fact that if comments are switched off, site admins can still make comments and read comments, even though regular users cannot see or create comments. this is a no-no.

Comments == OFF should be global and absolute for that content type. That's the only way that this Comment Settings form can become usable and understandable by the masses. If a content type's comments are switched from "off" to "read-only", it should pertain to all users. Perhaps what we need is a fourth setting called "admin-only"?

Comments are;
OFF
ON for "administer comments" admins
Read-only for users (and read/write for admins)
Read/write for users (and read/write for admins)

In this way, we could show and hide certain aspects of this form, or disable/enable child settings if their parents were turned on and shown, and whatever. It would make this process far less confusing when trying to decide which parts of the form to show or hide in order to make things more admin friendly.

Personally, I'm not a fan of nested fieldsets.

I think we could get a lot just from moving the comment form to a tab on the admin/content/node-type pages instead of having it within the node settings form itself - that'd also allow for fieldsets without the nesting.

I thought we'd conclusively proven during usability testing that local tabs are largely ignored by users and admins alike? I myself am also not a fan of nested fieldsets, but since this particular form makes such heavy use of them in the 'email settings' section (and all of those are, gasp, collapsed!) we aren't loosing any ground by implementing this patch as it stands.

Yes, there's got to be a better way, but as I outlined above, other things have to change before we can really make this part sexy. For now, this is a good UI improvement, even though it might not be the *best* thing anyone's ever thought of in the history of the world. I say we go for it, cause it lends structure and understanding to a rather complicated process.

No nested tabs, please.

Senpai: yes, users mainly ignored tabs, we thought this was partly due to the un-tab-like nature of tabs on Garland though and wanted to repeat the testing with differently styled ones at some point.

As well as that though, users were completely flummoxed by the node settings form (which they were looking at instead of the tabs) - not the least because of it's ~1 metre length. The comment settings fieldset was the source of my favourite UMN quote, 'yowzer'. I think this is one case where tabs make sense tbh.

Moving all usability issues to Drupal - component usability.

Totally rewritten, new seven theme takes care of this;