Improve Themes Admin Description

First of all lets not give recomondations on theme use, second - sidewide vs theme specific might be a hard concept to explain

While I completely agree with the recent "less is more" approach, I'm not sure this is an improvement. In particular, the existing help text introduces a number of important concepts, not the least of which is the why would only want one theme if you wanted to closely control your site presentation.

Specifically, in regard to this patch, the sentence "When themes are enabled, users can choose to display the site to them with that theme." makes no real sense.

This probably belongs with its cousins in the "user interface text" component.

keith.smith: Agreeing with keith smith, yet my suggestions of lets not give recomondations on theme use... We should try to explain the concept less difficult.

The current text is pretty good but are we happy to leave out info about default themes vs. enabled, and default themes vs admin themes?

Current text

Select the default theme for Drupal. To configure site-wide display settings, click the "configure" task above. Alternatively, to override these settings in a specific theme, click the "configure" link for that theme. Note that different themes may have different regions available for displaying content.

To change the appearance of your site, a number of contributed themes are available, or you may customize your own.

Alternate text

Select the default theme for your site. To change the look of your site, a number of contributed themes are available, or you may use a contributed theme as a base to create a customized subtheme.

To configure site-wide display settings, click the "configure" task above. Alternatively, to override these settings in a specific theme, click the "configure" link for that theme. Note that different themes may have different regions available for displaying content."

Alternate text

Select the default theme for your site. To change the look of your site, a number of contributed themes are available, or you may use a contributed theme as a base to create a customized subtheme.

To configure site-wide display settings, click the "configure" task above. Alternatively, to override these settings in a specific theme, click the "configure" link for that theme. Note that different themes may have different regions available for displaying content."

** I think the new alternative text is just as confusing but I'll take a swing at rewording it.

Select the default theme for your site.

The "configure" tab above allows you to configure site-wide display settings. To override these settings within a specific theme, click the "configure" link for that theme.

Alternative themes can be used (i.e. contributed themes, or subthemes based from contributed themes). These themes may have varying content display regions from the default themes.

Select the default theme for your site.

The "configure" tab above allows you to configure site-wide display settings. To override these settings within a specific theme, click the "configure" link for that theme.

Alternative themes can be used (i.e. contributed themes, or subthemes based from contributed themes). For additional themes to appear they must be added to the /sites/all/themes directory.

I think the whole " To configure site-wide display settings, click the "configure" task above. Alternatively, to override these settings in a specific theme, click the "configure" link for that theme." - is confusing, we will never convey to the user what this means. You have global settings, and theme specific settings the one over rule the other, but also not? WTF? Lets just drop this, people will go to settings on the specific theme hopefully.

Point taken, Should we keep the info re: alt. themes?

Select the default theme for your site.

Alternative themes can be used (i.e. contributed themes, or subthemes based from contributed themes). For additional themes to appear they must be added to the /sites/all/themes directory.

Yes, we should keep the alternative theme information. However lets make it a clear sentence, that conveys look of your site can be changed with other contributable(asin go to that link to drupal.org). We are in apperance after all, and not technical information such as sub-themes and where to place it.

Ok, final text is:

Set and configure the default theme for your website. Alternative themes are available on drupal.org.

where 'themes' is linked to the contributed themes on drupal.org.

Attached is a screen shot and patch.

Looks good to me! Thanks Diliny.

I've tested and it looks good. Concise and to the point.

OT, but curious what you all think: Does a little 'help' icon seems missing here? This is off-topic, sort of, but I'm getting concerned about the Help section of Drupal 7. Would it be useful to have a 'help' page related to Themes? I think so, in order to explain/demonstrate basic concepts, and feed users who need help to the appropriate handbook pages quickly.

Especially, since the intro text of most sections is being made shorter.

+++ modules/system/system.module	2009-10-22 17:15:44 +0000
@@ -107,8 +107,8 @@
+      $output = '<p>' . t('') . '</p>';

What is that? Looks wrong to me.

For anyone doing the cleanup, you can remove " on drupal.org".

Deleted empty paragraph #21, and removed 'on drupal.org' #22.

Heather, patch & screenshot look good.

Re: the help section on themes, I'd say yes.

Back to RTBC

Hm. Wow. That's really sparse. :\

I'm not so sure about this. Global vs. theme-specific config and enabled vs. default are incredibly confusing concepts, and if we don't document them here, how are people ever going to figure them out without lots and lots of trial and error and head-smashing? Could we couple this reduction of text above the table with a "more help" page for themes that explains the interface further if people need more guidance?

Also, I'm wondering if, rather than further muting the visibility of the available themes link, should we make it a full-fledged "action" link (like "Add new content" on the content admin page)? Particularly if we end up not getting any additional core themes into Drupal 7 (which, barring some sort of miracle, is probably what will happen...), this is probably the very first thing that someone's going to want to do when they get here.

@webchick We are actually thinking of naming the tab Global settings?

Not sure what you are purposing on the second one, turning adding a theme into an action link? Sounds like a really bad idea.

I know, I think its kind of a wierd idea. Also on the modules page, but I have no say in that.

I guess we need guidelines then on when is/is not appropriate to use those action links, because it seemed to me that for modules and themes "Add a new one" is a perfect use of them, just as we do on the content listing, user listing, etc.

Anyway, the title of this issue is "Improve Themes Admin Description." But 'Set and configure the default theme for your website.' is obviously what this screen is for, so I'm not sure why it even needs to be there, and "Go get more of them" seems like an action link material for me (though apparently I'm wrong).

I don't see how we've improved anything here; we've essentially just removed the description. Is that our intent? If so, how does this help people?

Heya Webchick, just to reiterate what Eigentor has said: Removing the text can greatly improve the user experience.

Normal user behaviour is a simple pattern: "click something that seems cloase to my goal; if not the right thing, click back button; click something else close to my goal, if it's right, keep clicking. repeat." The average user completes their tasks in this way. The 'wall of text' on most pages was making up for weaknesses in the interface or workflow. Yet, rather than guiding the user, the wall of text seems impenetrable and intimidating.

As well, this improves the experience for the user who has learned the interface. It takes up less screen real estate. If a user interface 'looks' easy to use, users will have a more positive reaction.

Instead, additional text should be in a help section. This will be the satisfying 'click' for that user that needs a little more guidance.

Eigentor is correct, not only our user tests, but user tests industry-wide bear this out. Which should give us some confidence. Contrary to what Eigentor says, we do have a clear guideline on this. The User Interface Best Practices describe that we should keep text as brief as possible, and make functionality apparent through interface design.

However, more and more I am concerned about the help pages, their layout and format, and their contents.

This is about the time to talk about the Help pages certainly.

My try on when to use 'action' links:
Let's use action links only for stuff (content, users, vocabularies etc) created *in* Drupal and not for adding pieces (themes, modules) to your actual Drupal installation. It's two vastly different things. Adding a piece of content is quite safe to do. Let's not increase the mental barrier to perform these actions by using the same pattern for actions that are potentially a lot more disruptive (and add to another thing). Basically, don't mix up 'adding' and 'installing'.

How does removing text help?
- it acknowledges the fact that (most) people don't read anyway, so why spend screen real estate on it.
- heather describes how people go about things really well: click and try, go back if it didn't work, try something else. Let's design for that instead of trying to "explain what you are about to go see and do, possibly".

Also:
- 'Enabled' isn't documented in the existing text either, so that's no argument against this change. Like eigentor points out, we shouldn't try to explain technical concepts here.
- I like the 'Global settings' label very much, I see it's already in latest head, too. Nice.
- I don't think we need to make this patch require the addition of a help page.

Ok, I guess we'll just sell more copies of Using Drupal then when people can't figure out how to use this page. :P~

Committed to HEAD. :P