Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Following up on #1164760: [meta] New users universally did NOT understand that you can extend Drupal which renamed the "Modules" administration menu item to "Extend", we should rename "Configuration" to "Configure".
Currently, "Extend" is the only menu item in the toolbar that is unambiguously a verb rather than a noun (though there are one or two others that can be interpreted either way), and it looks particularly awkward right next to the noun "Configuration" since the two concepts are somewhat parallel.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #13 | rename-config-1839032-13.patch | 9.84 KB | David_Rothstein |
| #1 | rename-config-1839032-1.patch | 9.82 KB | David_Rothstein |
Comments
Comment #1
David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commentedHere is a patch.
Comment #2
sunOn first sight, I liked it.
But unfortunately, "Configure" is barely translatable. As in, close to impossible.
I don't know why it works in English, but at least in German, it's linguistically not right to use the direct translation (or any variation of it) without a preceding/following subject/object. It's one of those verbs that looks, sounds, and reads horrible when used in the imperative on its own.
Comment #3
Fabianx CreditAttribution: Fabianx commented#2: I don't think "Konfigurieren" (Configure) is worse than "Erweitern" (Extend). German verbs generally do not translate well for this purpose, but I would not block the issue on this. We can still choose to use "Erweiterungen" and "Konfiguration" in the german translation as this applies more to the German audience - without the english core having to adhere to that.
Checked, looks goods => RTBC
Comment #4
Bojhan CreditAttribution: Bojhan commentedSorry, but you cannot mark such a major change to vocabulary without any review.
I am not really convinced this is necessary, it does nothing for usability. We have had no issues with the label, nor in conjunction with the renamed label.
Comment #5
David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commentedAwkward phrasing is actually an issue in and of itself...
As for the renamed label, see http://groups.drupal.org/node/260203 :
Now I am not sure if that's related to this issue, but one possibility is that the context of the other menu items made them expect to see a noun there. Do you have any more insight or details on where those bullet points came from?
Comment #6
webchickAs a native English speaker, I can confirm that this would help balance things a lot better, and I'd be very curious to know if it helps with user understanding as well.
Comment #7
Bojhan CreditAttribution: Bojhan commented@David I doubt that is related, it sounds highly unlikely we will affect the usability of that label by adding another noun. I also wonder if those results are correct, something I need to check with dharmesh.
I am not opposed to this, but I really don't know if it does anything to help - it seems like we are guessing here it has any effect, other than us just liking two nouns next to each other. So I can go either way on this.
@sun is right that this is hard to translate. In general when we come up with smart small labels, translating that into other (germanic) languages is quite hard.
Comment #8
klonosCount Greek as another language that using the respective verb for "Configure" wouldn't make sense. But then again neither does "Extend". So, I guess we can leave it up to the translation teams of each language to decide if they should better keep a one-to-one (verb-to-verb or noun-to-noun) translation or if they should mix and match as it better makes sense for each language.
Comment #9
TravisCarden CreditAttribution: TravisCarden commentedIs there a discussion anywhere of the top level admin navigation items? I've always thought it seemed disjointed for "Extend" to be the only noun* in the list, as pointed out above, (and for its path to still be "admin/modules"), and I've never been convinced that "People" and "Users" really connote the same thing. It feels like we haven't decided for sure who we're targetting with our taxonomy and there's no controlling paradigm. *Edit: I meant the only verb.
Comment #10
David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commentedI think renaming admin/modules to admin/extend is still on the table as a followup to #1164760: [meta] New users universally did NOT understand that you can extend Drupal (and I don't understand why it wasn't done that way originally). "People" vs. "Users"... that's a whole other can of worms :) But neither is directly related to this issue.
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So, is there anything holding up the current patch here from getting committed? (Incredibly, the patch still applies after 5 months, and actually seems like it is still complete.) There is some lingering doubt at #1164760: [meta] New users universally did NOT understand that you can extend Drupal about whether we're sticking with Extend, but if that changes later this could always be rolled back then too.
To handle languages where "Configure" doesn't make sense on its own, I think we could consider using the 'context' option in t() to give translators more context. (That way, it could be translated as something more like "Configure site" in those languages.) However, if it's an equal problem with "Extend" then I think it would be better as a followup issue.
Comment #11
David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commented#1: rename-config-1839032-1.patch queued for re-testing.
Comment #13
David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commentedHm, the original patch does still apply for me, but apparently Git isn't able to deal with the patch fuzz.
Here's a reroll.
Comment #14
jwilson3TravisCarden, #9 brings up a decent point about "Extend" pointing to "admin/modules" (verb pointing to a noun). But, extend isn't the only noun in the list -- it's a verb. Did you mean that it seems disjoint for "Configuration" to be the only noun in the list?
I think the point about noun/verb consistency is less important from the point of view that this issue's OP is taking (that they should all be consistently verbs). Many, many software systems have top-level menu items containing both nouns and verbs. The choice for verb or noun should be dictated by the kind of things you will find underneath the menu and by what sounds most natural in a given language. This includes the possibility for one language to use a noun and another language to use a verb. (I'm not sure if this is technically feasible from how translation contexts work today or not).
UPDATE: oops david beat me to the punch with contexts. Thats what happens when you leave for a lunch break in the middle of a comment. ;)
Comment #15
TravisCarden CreditAttribution: TravisCarden commentedRe @jwilson3: Yeah, I meant that "Extend" is the only verb in the list. Thanks for catching that.
Comment #16
David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commented#13: rename-config-1839032-13.patch queued for re-testing.