Drupal administration user experience

Moderator: Kieran Lal

A couple of months ago we conducted a Drupal administration user experience survey[1] with 877 respondents. Here is a summary of the outstanding work to be done in response to the results of the survey. Much of the work involves interviewing users, doing surveys, and writing documentation about how to use Drupal. If attendees of the workshop are interested I would like to work with you to prepare some of this work in advance of the workshop so we can make the workshop time more productive. http://civicspacelabs.org/home/survey/categorization

We will also explore some of the innovative work with the Forms API to create multi-tabed forms to create basic, advanced, and expert forms. We will also explore some of the new Form Wizards.

Summary of administration problems
Drupal is missing an overview of the site for administrators. We need to allow administrators to visualize and deliver a cohesive, compelling, and highly dynamic user experience to their end users.
ACTION: David Reed has developed the administration module[2], with screenshots[3], and designs by Isaac Horton. He is now working with Earl Miles.
TODO: We are looking for people to help with the development and testing of an administer module with guidance from our information architects, David, and Earl

Top administration tasks
1. Administer content such as comments-83% of respondents
ACTION: Jeremy Andrews, for CivicSpace Labs(CSL), has added multiple comment administration to make administering comments easier.
2. Install new modules and learn new features- 83% respondents
ACTION: Wrote 81 administration help handbook pages for Drupal Handbook : the Drupal Docs team
ACTION: Committed administration help for 31 modules in Drupal core and dozens of contributed modules.
ACTION: Developed project module to allow categorization of modules on Drupal.org. Developed by Nedjo Rogers, CSL, and Dries.
ACTION: Developed project module to report to Drupal.org what modules are being used and infrastructure to identify if modules have updates(security review pending). Nedjo Rogers and CSL.
TODO: Test the new project module categorization at http://scratch.drupal.org/project/Modules
TODO: Card sort contributed modules to identify categories for Drupal modules

Difficult administration tasks
1. Manage inconsistency in themes- http://drupal.org/node/37156
ACTION: Wrote managing inconsistencies in theme with community
ACTION: Conducted 6 theme developer interviews to identify theme development tasks for Drupal theme help documentation
ACTION: Launched Drupal theme mailing list, and launched #drupal-themes

2. Find pages that are deeply linked:
ACTION: Change content type administration to be 3 links deep for content types based on flexinode

3. Configure blocks for roles
TODO: Configure blocks for roles-Dries

4. Understand Drupal terminology and synonyms- Need to do study
TODO: Conduct survey of CMS standard terminology and user expectations of terminology

5. Update site to a new version of Drupal
ACTION: Added UPGRADE.txt with basic instructions
ACTION: Ported CivicSpace upgrade instructions to http://drupal.org/upgrade/tutorial-introduction

6. Compare Drupal files
ACTION: Developed Drupal and project module infrastructure to send messages potentially including module version information and updates.

7. Administer categories with the taxonomy module
TODO: Interview users about taxonomy ACTION:http://civicspacelabs.org/home/survey/categorization

8. Order and organize content.
TODO: Interview users about how to order and organize content
TODO: Categorize modules that order and organize content

9. Administer structure of content.
TODO: Research capabilities for modifying structure of content

10. Administer Menu's
ACTION: Assigned Richard Archer menu maintainer
TODO: Card sort default Drupal menu items
TODO: Separate administration menu from navigation menu to be more situationally relevant
TODO: Remove or make optional user name label for navigation menu

11. Administer site navigation
TODO: Research capabilities for global, local, contextual, and situational navigation

Links:
1. http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=1425065&U=142506581557
3. http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/der/admin4.PN...
2. http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/administration