UB Usability : Labeling Front Page

The attached patch makes the following changes.

-  $links[] = '<a href="' . base_path() . '">Main page</a>';
-  $links[] = '<a href="' . base_path() . '?q=admin">Administration pages</a>';
+  $links[] = '<a href="' . base_path() . '">Home page</a>';
+  $links[] = '<a href="' . base_path() . '?q=admin">Administrative overview page</a>';

I added the administrative part because a single link cannot (or in this case, does not) redirect to multiple "pages".

There are about 25 cases where we refer to "front page" in user-facing text, based on my best-guess grep. Any other comments on this? I'll roll a patch if a few other people chime in with an opinion.

Note that the patch does not replace all of the mentions of front page, but nor does it change main page to front page. So on its own, the result is still inconsistent...

Collision.

I'm undecided on this. Front page, Main page and Home page are all commonly used. MediaWiki uses Main page. I would support this change if I were certain that nobody would complain if it were changed. This one user was used to Home page, but this might not be representative.

Yeah, good point. So, forget #4 and we should take care of it in a larger patch.

So I guess I vote "Home page" instead of either "Main page" or "Front page". I'll volunteer to roll the patch (and try to get it right this time) for whatever the community may prefer.

Thoughts?

How do you back that up, though? I'm not sure why Home page should be more consistent than Front page in anyone's vocabulary.

You can make a case for consistency with the bread-crumb, however. I think Home is used there...

Whatever is decided here, make sure that the <front> token is updated accordingly. it'd be very confusing if we refer to it everywhere as "Main page" or "Home page" but you type <front> as the path to make a menu link to it.

From Jakob Nielsen's 'Prioritizing Web Usability', page 78 on Violating Web-Wide Conventions:
Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience: Users spend most of their time on other Web sites. Users gear their expectations for your site by what they have learned to expect elsewhere.

With that in mind: http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=home+page&word2=fr...

Here.

This is a simple text replace. By replacing "front page", "%front" and "", I got all relevant mentions of the word.

There will need to be an update function to replace settings like on old sites.

Forgot to add: $front_page is still used very frequently. If you want the word gone from non-user facing text, this will take a good while longer to check.

Sure, let's go with 'home page'. I agree that it is slightly more intuitive. <front> should probably become <home>, and it probably needs some upgrade path too.

I think it'd be worth changing $front_page to $home_page along with this.

Places where <front> might be that would need to be adjusted for the upgrade path...

- Block visibility settings
- Menu item paths
- Path aliases
- Other?

Oh. The one other place in the UI that referenced "front" page is the checkbox on nodes, "Promote to front page."

I have always hated this wording because it doesn't promote it to the front page at all; it lists it on ?q=node, which if you leave the default settings happens to also be your front page. :P But if you don't, it doesn't do seemingly anything.

For this issue, we should probably just rename it "Promote to home page," but in some other issue I'd love to find a better wording for that that more accurately reflects what it does. "List in main content listing" or something.

main content listing (with a link, oh yes please - if we can do it without losing people's form data ;) ) sounds good to me. It would also sound slightly better when used as a views filter as well.

Might be worth adding that this also determines what appears in the example.com/rss.xml feed somewhere.

Would it be an over-assumption if we referred to /node as the "main news page"? Not all Drupal sites are used for news, after all. Still, "main content listing" to me implies that it lists all content by default, and that anything not on it is somehow "hidden", which is not really the case.

I'd be -1 to mentioning news anywhere. If we only use 'main content listing' in the context of 'promote to' - then that ought to make it clear that articles which aren't promoted won't appear in it.

with a link, oh yes please - if we can do it without losing people's form data ;)

I can anticipate where that is going, so a preemptive -1 on using the deprecated target attribute. :)

@Arancaytar - me too, but we can't do the same thing as input format 'help' either.

This long before code freeze, we could still explore some cool new user interface concepts. For example letting jQuery catch click events if a form has unsaved input. The click event could fade in a warning box next to the link (alert()s are annoying) and open the new page only on the second click.

That goes far beyond the scope of this issue. Just tossing the idea out there...

Edit: Already being discussed. #193799: Warn before losing changes (eg: blocks and menu admin pages)

Having read the usability report myself now, I noticed something:

Promote to front page check box (terminology): A participant was confused of the terminology to describe the web site’s main page. The participant expected to see Home Page used instead of Front Page. "Again, am not familiar with 'front 'page' except in the newspaper but, it works." (Participant 4)

The thing is that /node is like the front page of a newspaper. Of course, /node is coincidentally also the home page of the website by default, but you can also set the home page to a welcome message, and have "/node" be available at a "News" menu link.

In that sense, perhaps "Promote to Front Page" does make sense in a news context, while the term should be changed to "Home Page" in admin/settings/site-info when choosing what context to display on the Home Page. "Promote to Home Page" would be hopelessly confusing if the admin had aliased /node to /news, and set the home page content to something entirely different.

I think we're making a mistake. "Promote to home page" sounds like it's going to appear on someone's 1996 geocites site. Or does it mean it will show up on a user's browser's home page? I'm not suprised that people are more familiar with the term home page -- but its a very non specific term used in a wide variety of contexts.

I personally don't think the terminology is at fault. Its the disconnect between the front page, and most of the settings that use it. Will calling it a home page mean users suddenly will understand the concept of promoting published content, vs just publishing content? I'm skeptical.

As for changing the names of "", "is_front()", I beg you to reconsider. This will make a large number of themes, and custom sites not work in properly in drupal 7 without doing a find replace. I know its not a big deal, but I don't feel that there's enough certainty here to ask our users to do that work. Especially on top of all the other work we are asking them to do be drupal 7 ready.

For the purposes of testing, it'd be easy to do a quick translation between "promote to front page" and "promote to home page". Overall I agree with Nick Lewis' concerns here - moreover I think a lot of the problem is with the rest of the stuff in that fieldset (sticky at top of lists, published etc.) - which pretty much needs to be rethought in general.

#282122: D7UX: "Save draft" and "Publish" buttons on node forms is a good start on that.

Nick Lewis, I appreciate your opinion. But the idea is with Usability, that you try to tone out your opinion.

Usability does not involve toning out opinion; like any problem that has multiple solutions, it involves gathering a number of well-reasoned opinions, weighing them against each other and deciding what will do the least damage. Nick has provided sound reasoning for this suggestion, so it should probably be considered on merit rather than rejected on principle.

The "Google Fight" that yoroy posted above is compelling: 1.8 billion results for "home page" vs. 150 million for "front page." 'Nuff said; "home page" is the ubiquitous term. Plus Dries likes the idea. ;)

Nick's argument about needing to change is_front() to is_home() and whatnot is a bit silly. Find/replacing a couple variable/function names in themes is going to be the /least/ of peoples' problems when updating between 6.x and 7.x. And Coder module will automatically catch it anyway, so it's rather a moot point.

This patch still needs an upgrade path. Also, any discussion about what to do with the horribly named "Promote to home page" checkbox should be dealt with in a separate issue; I'd like to see that nailed down properly which is a much larger issue than simply what the label next to it is called.

Regarding "Promote to home page" text, there's an issue on the usability of node publishing ticky box texts here: http://drupal.org/node/58394

This has been approved by the usability team as a direction to go in, plus it has Dries's +1, so let's get those functions renamed and that upgrade path posted.

Bump, any takers for this?

Re #21: Wordpress uses Front page and Posts page. The Posts page is the page where all the "promoted" nodes appear. The Front page may be the Posts page.

Related issue #404300: "Promote to front page" is a misnomer (might make sense to merge?)

I don't think we should merge these issues, there's two things we mean when discussing the front page - the actual front page that appears, and /node and rss.xml content listing which is the default. The other issue only deals with the latter (and does so in a way that the arguments about front vs. home are nicely circumvented) - whereas this issue is about what to call the front page itself regardless of what's in it.

Per webchick's comment in another issue, I'm taking the liberty of moving this to 8.x.

Also, I'm surprised "main page" has not even been discussed, resting in popularity between home page and front page with 115 million hits in a Google fight (though still just about a third of what "home page" has, with 334 million hits). "Home page" is often used in the context of an entire website (e.g., http://drupal.org/node/270919 is a page of the drupal.org home page), especially by people "stuck" in earlier web decades (and in e.g. Danish "hjemmeside" (lit. "home page") is still the default term for websites, not just single pages on these). Neither "main page" or "front page" is ever (to my knowledge anyway) used in this context.

Patch from 7 years ago no longer applies ;)

I think one painless way this could work is if we start supporting <home> but keep silently supporting <front> as well. Not sure how would this otherwise be backwards compatible. Eg. contrib modules may still have fields and help text that work with <front> for example.

Here is a patch for 8.3.x

wow, that bad really?

This issue is being reviewed by the kind folks in Slack, #need-reveiw-queue. We are working to keep the size of Needs Review queue [2700+ issues] to around 400 (1 month or less), following Review a patch or merge require as a guide.

I agree with #44, I imagine a done of contrib modules and custom modules are relying on the route and would break a lot.

Moving to NW for discussing next steps.