Is this usable?: duplication of user menu links between Toolbar & Garland

1 and 2 are new additions.
3: There is already an issue to remove this, since it is an actual menu item and freaks the hell out of people.
4: Can be set up to be hidden for admins. Totally depends on what is exactly there on a given site. If there is a "My balance", "My groups", "My favorite music" section in there, that would be unique. Depends on site.
5: Not sure why would the site logo be outstanding. Pretty usual to link to the site homepage.
6: Not all themes display breadcrumbs, and the admin interface will not display them either (as far as the plan goes). The admin theme which is a result of the overlay work (see http://d7ux.org/content) is much more sparse then Garland, so when you are on an actual admin page, you will not get distracted by breadcrumbs and such.
7 and 8 will not show if you have JS turned on, since an overlay will show you the admin screen (which hides all other menus behind itself, so less menus will show at once); Also, if you don't have JS, the whole page will be themed by the admin menu, which again will be more sparse then Garland, and will have much less of these page dressings :)

Also, I think in usability tests, Garland itself was proven to not be a usability poster-child, exactly because it does not have much variety in how it presents information and menus. That is the price to pay for a generic theme, so no surprise I'd say.

No breadcrumbs in /admin, really? That's going to make imagecache, vocabularies and content types pretty much impossible to work with.

The Admin menu only really makes sense when you're viewing the site in the Slate admin theme. Check out the screenshots of drupal.org/project/admin to see what it looks like on a real working Drupal site. It does look really weird in Garland, though. I never saw it that way because I'm using it on 6.x.

As for my thoughts on the Admin menu in Garland:
#3 is very confusing.
#4 is redundant for admins (the 2 logout links) & probably shouldn't show up for them.
#5 seems OK to me (link to the homepage).
#6 should have some sort of arrow to indicate that it's a breadcrumb.
#7 should actually look like tabs, the way it does in Slate.
#8 is just on that page, and it's really just a normal link. It only looks weird in this screenshot, I think, because the page is cut off.

So basically, I think the usability issues are with Garland, not with the Admin menu.

chx, I didn't mean to suggest you can't post it as a bug. I was just expressing my opinion that the header is usable, it just doesn't work well with Garland. I've been using the 6.x version of it for the past several weeks on a non-Garland theme that uses Nice Menus for primary navigation, where it works better because there's no clash with primary/secondary links and other (imo, outdated) navigation metaphors.

Adding tag

Another tag

Oops, fixing

@chx No, there is definitely some work ahead of us. I'd also like to say, that by no means is the header in it's final stage yet - we haven't usability tested it at all, so we could even see that its not working.

3,4 should be removed
5. should be fine
6. yhea won't exist in admin theme
7. We didn't really fix tabs in the admin theme either, or at least I am yet to find out how :)

from comment #5:

The Admin menu only really makes sense when you're viewing the site in the Slate admin theme.

And I assume this is not being considered a bug? For me it is a bug as on my site I do not want an admin theme - it breaks consistency and members have previously refused to use wordpress because this consistency breaking jarred them. (I stick to the opinion that no one else has that slate should be a "normal" theme that can be used for the whole site instead something just for the admin section.)

The admin theme should be a nice-to-have but not something that breaks the site if it is not used.

A question over the big usability picture... there is a lot of "trust us we know what we are doing" involved to get all the pieces in - and that is needed as without the whole picture, the smaller elements may not fit in well. But what if after the bigger picture is made, would it now be "its already in core, so cannot be removed" or will things be allowed to be dumped if they do not work?

(call this a "subscribe" post)

I guess I was assuming that the Admin menu could be disabled. If it's not easily removable from Drupal, or if it takes a custom module to remove, then I would say this is definitely a bug. No matter how nice the new admin theme and menu turn out to be, they shouldn't be forced on anyone.

The toolbar is a module, so you can disable it like any other module. There's also a permission you can grant or deny to roles.

Ok, great. Then I'm not too worried about this, since people who don't like the toolbar, or who don't think it fits in with their theming, can just not enable it.

As for Slate being used for the whole site, I think the reason that most people oppose that is that it's a branding issue. They don't want the branding of Drupal to be diluted by having lots of sites that show Slate as the front-end. Or maybe that's just my thought.

nbz: People can set a different admin theme (we currently just use the admin theme setting in the overlay module), as well as just use the public theme as an admin theme. The toolbar and the overlay and the admin theme are all replaceable parts of a system. They provide a default experience, which is to be user experience tested and refined, so you can either take it or replace and override any of the parts.

@Gabor, @Evan: My post was more about "The Admin menu only really makes sense when you're viewing the site in the Slate admin theme." from comment #5 which I probably incorrectly assumed to mean way more than it did - ofcourse the rest of the post did clarify that the usability issues outside toolbar+admin slate+overlay are also important to address and I agree with that.

Apologies over the noise.

Sorry if I contributed any confusion to this issue. Gabor's summary makes sense, and I am completely satisfied. I still think Garland is a bit busy for a front-end theme, but that's another issue...

No breadcrumbs in /admin, really? That's going to make imagecache, vocabularies and content types pretty much impossible to work with.

Critical bug. Also the admin theme needs breadcrumbs. Otherwise, it'll fail, I can assure you.

Additionally, people somehow started to talk about the admin theme in here. Why? chx's screenshot does not show the admin theme. Many people will still not use an admin theme, regardless of how good you make it (and IMHO, the entire idea of having one is wrong).

Furthermore:

- The toolbar takes up 25-30% of the available screen height in chx's screenshot. That's too big.

- #3 we should indeed remove. Not sure whether those links were considered useful in the last user testing.

- #8 is actually the location, where #542658: Move action "tabs" out of local tasks wants to move more tasks ("actions", i.e. the "add" action when being on the content-type admin page) into.

This issue covers too many points in my opinion, unless we want to turn this in a meta issue and list open issues.

I'm putting this back to normal since the critical part already have an issue #548806: No breadcrumbs in Seven opened. :-)

Changing the title to better reflect the issue.

My opinion is either breadcrumbs or something similar is necessary as without them it can be difficult to go back one level.

Still not sure what needs fixing here. Chx, how do you feel about current status of this in HEAD?

Looks like a couple of related issues have been fixed.

I think there is one more potential fix to be made here (based on my testing of CVS checkout of Mar. 27, 2010), so I am reopening this issue, since I think that chx's original intent was to highlight just how many different links show up when you are using Garland with the Toolbar. (And I misunderstood him, so I apologize.)

Now that Overlay and Edit-in-Place are in, the situation is much better. Thanks everyone!

But I noticed when testing Drupal 7 this morning that if you select the default install profile, install Drupal, and then go to your new site, you see a duplication of the "Username | Log Out" links: they are in both the Toolbar and Garland.

Since the user menu in Garland is not in a region, but is hard-coded in the theme (though on a quick look I couldn't find where), then there's no easy way to fix this, unfortunately. If it were in a region, then the block could simply be set to not show in that region in the default install profile (since Toolbar would handle showing it).

Since it's not in a region, then, as benjamin-agaric suggested on IRC this morning, it would seem the only way to fix the problem would be to have a preprocess function that would render the user menu as an empty string (""), or something similar, on the condition if (module_exists("toolbar")).

Does anyone (beside me) think that this would be a helpful fix to make? If so, perhaps I could figure out how to make a patch against 7.x :)

Screenshot of the issue is attached.

Better title.

The user menu is supposed to be for general site users, not just those with access to the toolbar, so I don't agree with simply removing it. There's an issue elsewhere about the user menu / secondary links usage being a bit of a mess - that was committed as a temporary fix several months ago but never properly followed up on.

catch: Ah, that makes sense. It is just weird when first logging in to your site (as user/1, of course). So to hide it in Garland, the preprocess for the Garland user menu would probably have to check user_access to the Toolbar also, to see if it was actually being rendered.

What is the # of the other issue? Maybe we should close this again, and follow up in there.

Let's keep this closed.

The user menu must be displayed since normal user will not see the toolbar, hence a duplication for user/1.

Catch refers to this issue #698014: Theme settings for main/secondary variables mismatch with menu settings.