D7UX: Dashboard contents

1. can we have some friendly "empty" text when there's nothing here?

2. What about User Stats (counts / roles / active)?

3. What about taxonomy (list of vocabs and type / term counts / add + edit links)?

4. Administration Shortcuts aren't really shortcuts.
4a. No one ever uses the node/add page. Can we put in links to each content type instead?
4b. can we add "administer comments" (is there better language than that? "manage comments"?)
4c. We have a link to the "dashboard" (/admin) from the "dashboard" (/admin/dashboard"). Can we change the text to "up" ?

I for one would love the pretty graph of traffic, if at all possible (which it might not be without requiring a contrib module). Call me a noob, but sometimes you just want to glance without going all the way to Google Analytics.

+1 for a traffic graph for a quick look at what's happening on your site.

In my opinion the traffic widget would require more than we can handle in core at the present time because it would need some type of Graphing API. Correct me if i'm wrong but this seems like a lot of work done in time.

There is however the Google Analytics API contrib module which works in well with the Google Analytics module to bring you analytics stats back into Drupal.

I believe some of the most used widgets will be "Moderate Comments", "Moderate Nodes", "Moderate Users".

I had a play around with the Moderate Comments mockup and attached is what I came up with. A few of the elements need a bit more padding/margin.

Couldn't we just leverage the Statistics module for a basic traffic widget? In fact, most of the blocks from the Statistics module would make good dashboard content.

@amc yeah I think a basic traffic widget would be good.

A traffic widget would indeed be nice to have. But it's certainly not a must have, it's not essential to the task of administering your site. And as SeanBannister has already mentioned, without a graph API this would be hard to implement. So I'm in favour of implementing this with a contrib module.

I've tried to aggregate the goals of the dashboard found on http://www.d7ux.org/dashboard/ below ( + added my own opinion, marked with a question mark ):

• fast access to frequent tasks, such as:
• moderating/monitoring user generated content (i.e. comments)
• creating new content (Quick Posting)
• managing drafts
• monitor new users
• ...
• tell the administrator about (technical) problems, like broken links
• connect the administrator with the community
• updates, security issues
• information about contrib modules (most popular, related, .. )
• tip of the day?
• link to handbooks?
• list recently installed modules + shortcuts to their configuration pages ?

Only a few blocks already implement (partly) the functionality described above.

"Recent comments" lists indeed the recent comments but doesn't allow you to interact with these comments, I think the mockup of SeanBannister is a good indication of what we should achieve.

But most other functionality has still to be implemented (correct me if I'm wrong).

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Just found #488550: [PP-1] D7UX Microproject - Dashboard Widget for Traffic Data.

Bump to critical, we *really* should have some sensible defaults available to make a useful dashboard page.
Scanning the suggestions here and some inquiry in IRC it seems like:

### Must haves:
- comments awaiting approval
- number of published / unpublished nodes
- available updates
- direct shortcuts to creating content of a specific type

### Should haves
- Drupal.org newsflashes
- Traffic data (but really how feasible is that with what we have in core now?)
- Shortcuts to drafts

### Nice to haves
- Watchdog messages?
- List of recenly installed modules
- And all the other fun stuff we already have in core (recent forum posts, recent comments, who's online, who's new etc)
… anyway, it's easy to come up with nice2haves, but that should not be the focus now.

____________________________

So, is this something we can agree on:

### Must haves
- comments awaiting approval
- number of published / unpublished nodes
- available updates
- direct shortcuts to creating content of a specific type

We'd still need to spec each individual block of course, but at least this would give us some direction on which ones to do that for. Thoughts?

Sounds sensible.

Hmm left out accounts awaiting approval / link to users list, also a must have methinks

### Must haves
- comments awaiting approval
- number of published / unpublished nodes
- user accounts awaiting approval
- available updates
- direct shortcuts to creating content of a specific type

Agreed with swapping out 'awaiting' for 'recent'. 'Awaiting' assumes a certain use case. (like currently in core, the default for account creation is 'just let everybody signup, no approval needed'. Same with comments.)

Also agree on leaving out the 'actions' bit for now, with a possible exception of the direct links to create content of a certain type. It's easy to forget how much better the 'add content' shortcut is in the toolbar, but I'm already annoyed by the intermediate page it links to.

Interestingly, this makes only the 'recent content' block a new one. I'm sure we want to have a close look at the existing 'recent comments' and 'new users' blocks but hey, it's a start!

#337947: Correct whitespace issue for 'recent content block' in dashboard

For future reference, an issue was started on a watchdog block at #488570: Block for dblog, although as of yet discussion hasn't really gone anywhere...

Yup! That's why we be taggin' :-) http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=dashboard

I was already working on the recent content & the approval block.
This is only a first try, so there's still a lot of work to be done. Especially on the approval block.
As for now this block only shows the unapproved comments, there's not yet a way to approve or delete them.
Also, I haven't touched the styling yet, so it is a bit ugly :).
But it's a start. Let me know what you think.

hmmm, I totally missed #337947: Correct whitespace issue for 'recent content block' in dashboard

jolos: thanks for your quick reply, but please follow up the actual coding in that other issue. This one is better off only discussing the general direction of the ones we want on the dashboard. Thanks!

Don't want to derail the issue, I agree with having blocks for Recent Content/Comments/Users but I think they should work similar to the current Comments page (/admin/content/comment) at the top it provides two options [Published Comments] [Approval queue]. I think we'll find the ability to moderate the content from the dashboard is what'll make it really useful.

We'd need to work out the terminology so it was consistent but it'd be something like :

* Recent content
[Published] [Unpublished]

* Recent comments
[Published] [Awaiting Approval]

* Recent users
[Approved] [Awaiting Approval]

I've been thinking about recent comments / recent content - and for me, I'd want quick links to edit and delete those, not just view them. So I'd suggest we add new 'content administration' 'user administration' and 'comment administration' blocks which have those handy links on them.

Would be good to have a block which provides the same information as admin/reports/status.

One thing we don't provide anywhere in core yet, but is useful information, is number of nodes / comments / users on the site - we can also do that historically quite easily, so:

                  | Total |Today | Week | Month | Year |
Content     | 211   | 0        | 25      | 10       | 112  | 
Comments | 2543 |  10     | 56      | 200     | 356 | 
Users         | 762   |  1       | 3         | 30       | 97   |
// These we can't do historical data, but:
Terms?
Content types?
Views?

I agree with @catch: Although a "comment administration" block would in some ways contain similar information as the current "recent comments" block, it does make sense to create a totally new block for this rather than trying to reconfigure the current one to work in both places.

That sounds like the most flexible solution, especially since there's a good chance we'll be technically limited so that a block which appears in the dashboard cannot appear elsewhere on the parts of the site that use the same theme.

As per discussion at #544360: D7UX dashboard module, I'd suggest we make this a strong recommendation for contributed modules who are thinking about making blocks for the dashboard. They are going to need some guidance here. So the advice would be: "Don't add lots of configuration options to your current blocks to make them do double-duty on the dashboard. Instead, create a new administration-focused block."

@catch what (module or w/e) would be responsible for this block? since it's node.module + comment.module + user.module

is there a possibility to have the outline of the block live in system.module, and have the other modules add their content to it?

if not, would it make sense to have it live in the dashboard.module and add a check for comment.module (since that's the only one u can actually disable) or would it make more sense to have all these modules expose the "overview block" data in a separate hook and have something else handle stuffing it all in a neat block?

@seutje, if you mean the general system stats one, I'd put it in system.module and provide an _alter() hook for data to be added.

Continued 'recent items' discussion is here: #614410: Patterns for recent-items-blocks on the dashboard

Keep discussing other likely candidates for default core here:

- A block which provides the most important bits of admin/reports/status.
Sounds most important/useful. Should probably start a seperate issue for it's design too.

- Number of x, y and z on the site.
- Statistics module summary
- Drupal.org newsfeed
-…?

Looking back up at #11, no new critical must haves we can think of? Would like to hear one more round of feedback on the necessitiy of these last 3.

this seems like a useful minimal implementation no?