Making drupal easier to use?

I think the general rule is "Easier for the user" === "Harder for the site developer". Someone must take the hit.

Drupal is very configurable, but usability for different kinds of sites is very different, and so is the site development work.

A site developer who does not want to spend much time can easily create a wide range of sites, but usability will suck.

One thing you can do is limit the amount of admin/* pages a user/client/whatever has to see and/or interact with as much as possible.

This module I have found most useful and a welcome addition to my usual list of usability-must-haves - http://drupal.org/project/vertical_tabs

I've found that the key thing to getting a customer comfortable with admin in any site maintenance scenario, Drupal or otherwise, is training and documentation. Do NOT rely on existing documentation -- write your own (or have written) at a level that matches your clients' sophistication. (As I write it occurs to me that a shared repository of documentation could be a good thing, but probably no two people would agree on what was "good enough" or even just good....)

We have a fairly comprehensive training document, and all our project estimates include an explicit line item for training that includes after-training support. This is actually a big confidence-builder: Our clients look at it and know that we're on the hook to help them after the training is done, and it helps them to believe that we've done what we can to make it usable.

I strongly advocate using an Administrative Theme. I've had really good responses when we've done that (we've done it both ways).

It does two things for you:

1 - It allows you more freedom in designing your main theme, because you're not hamstrung by the requirement to fit fixed-width fields and the like.

2 - Helps the user understand the difference between administrative screens (i.e., visible only to them) and customer-facing screens.

If you use an Admin theme, I strongly recommend you use either Garland (full-width) or a specialized administrative theme. (Bluemarine works fine, too.) You can easily customize the colors on Garland to match your client's palette, without having to code any HTML.

I haven't used it yet (plan to on next two sites), but it seems to me that Block Region should be very useful for cases where you're implementing an Admin Theme. As I read its functionality, it would prevent you from having to repeat configuring blocks that are shared between admin and customer-facing pages.

(I'll stop after this one -- posting these separately for clarity.)

First, IMCE is a wonderful thing. The user interactions are arguably a little clunky, but it does the job and integrates well with FCKEditor (and presumably TinyMCE, since that's what it was originally designed for). Asking users to FTP is a non-starter, AFAIAC; giving them a means (via IMCE) to upload images or PDFs or the like is a huge lightbulb momemt for users. They're not used to being able to do that with web forms, so it often makes them feel powerful in that moment, which is a good thing for you as a site-implementer.

Second, configure your WYSIWYG editor so that you can apply styles to affect text presentation. So, for example, you'll have a stylesheet definition for H3, configure your WYSIWYG editor so that the user has an easy way of applying H3. (In FCKEditor, you have to replace the standard Style widget with another widget -- can't remember the name.)

Think through what they'll need to do with copy, and give them the means to do it. Will they need to format images automatically? Create a selection that lets them add the appropriate style class to an image without having to edit source.

Here are a few things we always define and make available to users in our FCKEditor config:

• Image Right and Image Left (both with and without borders)
• Callout (usually larger, different color, bigger line-height, and indented from both sides)
• H2 through H6 (no H1, because that would fight with the main title)
• Remove styles (i.e., clear the Class attribute)
• Call To Action (usually bold, different color)
• HIGHLIGHT (used when proofing the site, to call attention to comments or errors)

We add others as needed, site by site. For a blogger, I'd add an explicit Blockquote style, as distinct from an indent.

At the same time, I strongly recommend you take away potentially problematic controls. E.g., don't let them change the color or size of text. If it's a corporate or organizational site, they shouldn't be doing that anyway -- they should be using the standard presentaton type sizes. If there's a need for a larger type size, there should be a style defined for that and you can add it to the tool set for your editor.

Obviously, this would vary with your target users' sophistication. I wouldn't take away size or color controls from a blogger, for example, generally. With FCKEditor you can use Roles to control what kind of toolbar each user will get. I'd like to assume you can do something similar w/ TinyMCE.

I totally agree the idea that documentation and training is the key to help people understand the way how Drupal works. Separate backend (admin theme) too helps folks to understand where they are and what they are doing.

Removing accessory menus and fields helps the user to concentrate to the task in hand.

In my view one thing in all cms systems that is hard to use is the WYSIWYG editor. People always say it's hard to use, it wont do what they say and so on. That's true because the editors change the appearance with tags and there can always be leftovers that leads to no function at all when chancing text size or whatever. However that is a thing we can do very little to.

One thing that helps to use the editor is that if it's width is the same as the target textarea or div. The text and pictures will flow just the same in the editor and textarea. Is there a module for getting the right width for the editor via some rules or something? Or do i have to somehow write it to manually to css for different page widths?

Another thing i would like to see from Drupal (now this is against my first paragraph : ) is if i could get it to work via modal boxes only. We made a site with such custom cms (site was very light) and it just works really well. The user feels he is on the site all the time and that everything happens on "real time". Also he sees less jumping between different admin theme and the site and that makes the hole system seem light and flexible.