A newbee tells his story...

Hello @all,

i am very new to Drupal.

Before starting using it I used CMSMadeSimple a short Time, tested out Mambo and started to write my own CMS.

But then I decided reinventing the wheel is not the best idea and went back to Drupal, which I knew already but wanted to test it now...

I want to tell you my impression that you can think about it and maybe implement some of them if you think that's are great (and working) ideas.

I am using Drupal 4.6.2 German

1. Administration

   • I am missing a Mainsite for the Administration.
     which welcomes you there friendly and gives you a starting point for your dayly job. which shows you some more general statistics.
     about the number of visitors today, the number of errors, the last posts... pot this logger in an own menu-point.
   • Give the Administration-Area a own Theme
     Why?
     because then it doesn't anymore depend on the style of the site.
     some templates are too small for the content of the admin-sites (namely: leaf)
     it coud pe made to fit the admin needs and not to fit the style needs of the officially visible style needs.

   clean up the admin interface.
   put functions of modules to the modules page and let them be accesed from there. so it would look more clean.

2. create content

   • I don't get the difference of an Article and a static page...
     maybe I'm just stupid but in the default configuration of Drupal and the Configuration I'm testing now I cant see any differences...
     please make this more visible - from the begining on.
   • make everything except of the most important fields of the create Article/static page collapsable (and collapsed by default)
     as you can see it on the menu_otf-module.
     the create-content site would look more friendly and not so overloaded.
   • maybe seperate it in many different Tabs.
     
     First one "Main", just for the Title and the Article, with a JavaScript button which inserts this Excerpt-comment-thing (do you know it's nowhere mentioned, that this command exists; that has to be more userfriendly...)
     Second one "Organize", with everything arount Taxonomy, Menu-integration and so on.
     Third one "Style", which let you define some special things around the theme.
     Depends on the theme. Maybe the Theme let you define a custom image in the front of every article (maybe to underline your mood & feel or so)
     
     where you can define special block-fields (with the correct module)
     and so on...
     
     The fourth one would I call "SEO" - why? I am too bad to find a better word for this. :D
     
     what do I mean with this?
     
     there you should be able to define keywords for the drupal-searchengine and the meta-tags.
     Should be able to write an own new description-text for the meta-tags or use the excerpt
     configuring of other meta-tags which are often used. (give the everytime the option to use the default one which are defined somewhere)
     
     maybe you know more things which should be integrated...
     And here you can see where an own admin-theme has also its benefits...

3. The Theme and Module thing...

   what comes now?
   

   I think it wouldnt be bad to be able to redesign every part of a site.
   
   beginning from the look and feel of the search-site, the presentation of an coment, taxonomy view, the list of the sides which you see on /nodes,
   and every output a module gives, eg the feedback module and so on...

   how to do this?
   

   First of all I love Smarty, it is more just webdesigner-friendly than every phptemplate could be, because you get just the function you could need and use.
   
   and it is easy to learn and use - btw. its fast :D
   
   I think that should get the default theme module... but this doesn't matter now...

   Smarty is able to look on different paths for an include file.
   
   first of all it looks in the templates' dir if there is an customized version.
   if not it should look in the modules dir... and then output it.
   
   such modules-Template must have a strict naming convention - like module_taxonomy_list.tpl
   module --> that you know this is an modules' specific template
   
   taxonomy --> the name of the module
   
   list --> the module specific use of this template
   
   smarty has also capabilities to include self definied functions so a template designer could implement small, very type specific smarty-functions...

If you would include this Drupal would become higly customizable and would get a much sweeter front end...

I want to stop now my list... because its late :D

But i want to say one thing: I tested it and was happy about what it is able to do but i also want to make it better - and also help on doing this.

but I need time to be far enough in how Drupal works to do this.

Sometimes there must be made something like a spring-cleaning to get it easier for beginners.

I know the most people who read this are using Drupal since months or maybe sinc years, so they a familiar with the UI but think about beginners... everything could be a lot everywhere...

please excuse my bad english

yours sincerely

Tobias Maier