Moving help to the right

Bojhan and I have been discussing this on IRC; we reckon this has to be a toolbar hack *cough* alteration rather than changing the admin menu.

Patch. Let's see what the bot says :)

Patch has obvious coding errors. Would be good to get a screenshot too.

By the way, I've been using the toolbar for months, and I haven't missed the icon a single time. It never logged me out. Maybe my clicking is deadly accurate?

Maybe.
I frequently miss what I click for.

Patch - you mean indentation? Yes, urgh, just spotted it. I was trying TextMate since everyone raves about it and looks like it fails at tabs :(
Is unsetting the array key okay?

Applied patch and now the help button is back. Wee minor issue with styling, it needs a little spacing on the right just to keep it clean.

My first very very tiny little patch :-( (gotta start somewhere). Hope it works.

Trying again...

for test bot

I committed the patch in #10, but not the patch in #6. The patch in #6 needs a bit more work/thought before it can be committed. The problem is that the patch hard codes the help-link whereas the help module can be disabled. If the help module is disabled (or if you don't have access to help), you still get a help link. Clicking the help button will then give a 404 (File not found) error. In other words, needs a bit more work.

Ah, gotcha.

@Bojhan Thanks, this is my first patch. Is there any docs on rolling a whole patch? This is the info i was following: http://drupal.org/node/550576

can some1 post a screenshot as to what this patch tries to do so I can account for the css change in #607682: Clean up the mess that is toolbar.css

please :)

@seutje It was only a very minor change to add some space on the right of the help button so it's not sitting right up against the toggle button:

div#toolbar div.toolbar-menu #toolbar-user {
  position: absolute;
  right: 50px;
}

yea I saw the change, but was unsure on where the help was suppose to show up after this patch

so I applied it to check and it looks like I managed to account for this change in http://drupal.org/node/607682#comment-2164908

removed position:absolute and right value from #toolbar-user and make it float right, instead put a 50px right-padding on the wrapping div

sry for any confusion I might of caused

@seutje update drupal from CVS just now. It seems the help link is now moved back to the left (sitting next to report link). I think there was a concern that users might accidentally click on logout instead of help. However, doesn't seem to have affected any of your changes.

Apart from that we feel Help fits better on the right, because it is an infrequently accessed IA item and people are familiar with such a location for help.

Why would it be legitimate to move the link on the right (I mean except the fact that you say so... have you any example of such placement ?) ? I find the "Help" or "?" menu on the right of left-aligned menus in most GUI, so how is it logical or well accepted to put that on right most of the menu ? I find that logout has it's place here because it's like "closing the application", which is indeed on top right of most GUI, but not "Help"... I've seen help button, that triggers a "help mode" which allows you to click on UI elements to get contextual help, but that's not the goal of our "Help" link so I don't find it is a good place.

An last, but not least, why would it be more legitimate to risk users seeking for help to logout ? For this part of the issue, I thought we were trying to solve it in #555712: Toolbar collapsing is inefficient, maybe I was mistaken.

@19: only the right: 50px; on #toolbar-user was committed, not the part that moves "Help" into #toolbar-user, so this is the only change I incorporated in #607682: Clean up the mess that is toolbar.css

@TheRec - I'm not disagreeing here, i just observed the change i saw after i ran CVS update on my dev site earlier.

@seutje - i like your toolbar.css clean up better.

@duvien: I wasn't really answering your message, but more the initial issue and Bojhan statements :) Sorry if you thought I was somewhat "attacking" you... I wasn't attacking Bojhan either, I'm just questioning the motivation and legitimation of this will to change the position of the "Help" link.

@seutje: Moving it to the right should in any case be done semantically (i.e. move the element to the right container and apply the right CSS) , so you're right, for the CSS cleanup patch to work you have to include it now that the right: 50px; was committed.

I've never said it was your personal opinion, I just say it's not clear what are the motives of this change and that the arguments you've exposed in the initial issue are not all legitimate (specifically the one saying that it is a "familiar" place for "Help"). It's not a personal attack, just an observation. The fact that it takes time to explain it doesn't really saves you from explaining it if someone asks for clarifications. I'm enquiring about it because I'm interested in it and I think that we ought to work in a collaborative way, it was not to slow you down.

So why this change? A law called "fitts's law" comes into play to which we have to play close attention

Yes Fitt's law applies in this case, it's related to the time and precision required to point an element at the top right and not click on "Logout" by accident. The change you suggest (moving "Help") does not solve this problem completely, currently the part that got committed by Dries does solve it (a bit... by moving away the "user menu" from the toggle).

To come back to the original issue (moving "Help"), I think you rather wanted to talk about Hick's law as you're suggesting that "Help" is not that relevant (that is your opinion, as far as I can read) and does not have its place on the "main menu" (which, I agree, should be composed only of useful links). Excuse me if I do not find this an objective reason, maybe I'm biased, but I think that moving "Help" will not improve Drupal. Working on help content would improve Drupal, your solution sounds more like hiding the dust under the carpet.

The other argument is that it is a "familiar" place for such element, I compare Drupal toolar to the meni menu of the browser because it serves the same purpose : command the application (but on different levels, one serves for the browser application, the other for the web application that is Drupal). The main menu of my browser has "?" as the last element (left aligned) and it is the same in most GUI of the applications on my computer. That is why, maybe by experience, I do not find that top right of our interface is the place for "Help", as I cannot find any example of interface doing it this way. Of course this does not change the fact that it is the right place for the "Logout" link as it can easily be compared to the "Close" button of any application, which is at top right most of the times.

All those considerations aside, you did not answer my main concern: Users who are seeking for "Help" will eventually click on "Logout" (because those elements would be closer to each other), so how is this a good solution? I mean, they do not know that help "is not helpful", they try to seek help and they log out accidentally, that's what I'd call frustrating... specially if they login again and find out that help "is not helpful" ;)

My comment regarding buttons that trigger help state was just to point out that cases of an active element leading to help (such as a "?" button next to the "X" button) on top right of the application exist, but they are rare... if I wouldn't have mentioned it, maybe someone would have mentioned this exception, which I consider irrelevant in this case.

Then, if we agree that it is not the final solution to "all" the problems we have with the use of the toggle, I'm fine with it. Thank you for the clarifications and sorry for writing such a big story ;)

Better to land on help then actually logging out. Collapsing will happen more often than using that specific global Help item (more likely via contextual help links in the pages themselves). I applied the patch and works as advertised:

Either works for me. I'm quite used to Help being on the left, because that is where Apple has its help -- it is the right-most menu item on the left-hand side of my navigation bar. Having it on the right works too, but it not where I'd personally expect it to be. Just my 2 cents.

wrong issue

my bad

The patch works as adverstised. I'd set it as RTBC now that we are two to say the last patch is working, but it's already done.

The eventuality that users will land on "Help" when trying to click on "Logout" (now that it will not be so close to the right... which is the familiar "Close this application" area) has not really be considered but I guess we agreed that this is not a definitive answer to the basis of the problem, so in my opinion this "works".

This will keep failing as it's not a patch related to this issue, seutje posted it by error... so I repost the unchanged patch (thanks davereid for the idea).

Hm. So. Just throwing this out there for consideration:

Facebook:

Google apps:

Flickr:

And, well, for that matter, Skitch:

The trend I notice is that all of these sites have their "Sign out" / "Log out" links are the far-most right-hand link, next to the other user-related links.

Can someone find an example of this pattern of integrating a non-user-specific link such as help with user-specific links such as profile, user settings logout anywhere else on the web? I really did look and I can't find any.

I was originally very in favour of this patch because I used to collapse the shortcut bar all the time since it was hard-coded and thus totally useless. However, now that I can actually customize the shortcuts bar, I actually find I leave it open all the time, so the links I need are instantly accessible. Additionally, shortcut and toolbar are now decoupled from one another, so it's now and "opt-in" thing which again means you're less likely to have to collapse this a lot. And finally, the "help" link is only visible to admin users, so this doesn't even really the "oops I accidentally logged out" problem for non-admin users, making it only a partial fix. AFAIK we also increased the spacing between the right-most link and the collapse bar a month or so ago. It's been a long time now since I logged myself out hourly, at any rate.

I'm now finding myself leaning towards "won't fix" on this. What do you guys think?

As I stated before, I'm not completely convinced by this solution which is basically a compromise, if not a convenient solution to a problem that does not exist (I've never heard of anyone complaining that "Help" was on the left to be honest... and if we're talking about "Help" not being helpful, then we should work on that and not just move it around for our own convenience). I still think that the basis of the problem was and still is #555712: Toolbar collapsing is inefficient which would require some tests and maybe new ideas. But for this very issue, the part that got committed (more "space" between "Logout" and the toggle) is also working great for me, I rarely logout by mistake, but since it has been committed I've never had this problem again... the only thing I find sad is that we are losing horizontal space, but I guess that's for the better (and #607682: Clean up the mess that is toolbar.css should solve this partially by removing all those postion: absolute; which causes overlapping when available with is not sufficient to diplay all the items on one line).

This no longer applies in D8.