The most useful usability improvement for the admin pages in D6 would be to include direct links to all the subtabs you can reach from each administration page.

For instance:

Categories
List | Add Vocabulary

Or the default could be left off.

This becomes really really useful as contributed modules start hiding their settings in with other modules, for instance with Default term module enabled the Categories listing on the admin page would become:

Categories
Add Vocabulary | Default Terms

A whole settings page which otherwise does not exist on the admin page.

The tab names themselves are informative about what each section is about. This is a huge win-win in my opinion and could build off the menu system pretty easily?

Comments

drumm’s picture

drumm
he/him
Location NY, US
commented

Why is this a huge win?

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented

Currently I have to click on a link in /admin, then work out whether the setting I want is in a tab or not, then another click to get to it. If I've got direct links to some areas then it saves me click > scroll > click.

It'd also mean that with a bit of reorganisation - the Taxonomy module admin could actually show you what it does rather than trying to explain the content in a single sentence - "add tags" "create category group" right from the /admin page - so everything would become a bit more task based.

gaele’s picture

gaele commented

The default admin page - without any contrib modules - has 35 links. Adding links to all the subtabs would result in over a hundred links on one page. I wouldn't call that a usability win.

Anyway, Drupal Administration Menu solves your problem (example).

mlncn’s picture

mlncn commented

A javascript drop-down fold-out menu overhanging every page of the site isn't what we're looking for (although Administration Menu is cool and its future as a more general menu manager looks fantastic).

The subtabs exist, that there are over 100 of them in Drupal is a fact, not an argument for hiding them from people.

Every link currently on the /admin page can have at most one line of subtabs-- that's the way Drupal displays them. So it's very easy to take this line of subtabs and turn it into a small set of sublinks.

It is a huge usability win because poking around into different settings pages until you find what you need is a huge usability loss.

Granted, it might scare newbies. For the hypothetical superexpert it's unnecessary. But for the vast majority of users, I argue that this would be very useful.

sun’s picture

sun
Primary language German
Location Karlsruhe
commented

Although this would dramatically simplify admin_menu's code in D6 (since it could rely on the same function to build the menu), I vote -1 on this. Even if all default local tasks were omitted, you'd end up with hundreds of links on a full featured Drupal site.

There have already been reports from users that admin_menu was not able to display all menu items in the visible viewport, f.e. below 'Settings'. This might give a vague estimation about how many links would be rendered.

Furthermore, a module like admin_menu displays also sub-items of sub-items. Many modules do not only include local tasks but also important second-level local tasks. For example the locale module in Drupal core. If we would add local tasks to the admin overview page, it would only make sense if we would add those second-level items, too.

I'd suggest to mark this won't fix.

gaele’s picture

gaele commented

I vote -1 on this particular issue too, but I share Benjamin's opinion that the current situation could be improved a lot. Maybe we could discuss this further on http://groups.drupal.org/usability, or Monday's at 18:00 UTC on #drupal-themes?

Bevan’s picture

Bevan commented

+1. This is a usability win for the majority. The page won't be longer. It will be the same length. HOWEVER, 'local tasks' (aka 'tabs') are currently in a state of disarray in drupal, which is part of the issue here I believe; http://groups.drupal.org/node/6923#comment-21498. Although we probably can't fix that issue till drupal 7...

sun’s picture

sun
Primary language German
Location Karlsruhe
commented
Version: 6.x-dev » 7.x-dev
sun’s picture

sun
Primary language German
Location Karlsruhe
commented
Component: admin.module » base system
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

I think this has been addressed to some extent in D7. If not fully, then I'm pretty sure that this is a duplicate of another issue.