What could Drupal implement from other CMS or content editors to improve its Admin Interface?

Shout-out to LICEcap (Win/OSX) as the most no-nonsense OSS/free instant screen-GIF-capture utility I've ever needed to demonstrate a single UI concept quickly. I use it several times a day in support issues and creating docs.
Protip: zoom your browser screen down a bit before recording, so your audience can watch your interaction, not read your text.

Thanks so much for working on this!

I recommend taking a look at Netlify CMS
https://www.netlifycms.org/

Here's some of the thinking we've been doing on Mass.gov, looking ahead to supporting an increasingly decoupled authoring experience:
https://medium.com/massdigital/backend-live-preview-fd9179132b1f

First of all thanks for raising this issue! Its a great point, and analysing competition and what they are doing right is a great first step.

I think I would categorise things I like to see in other CMS's in three or four different categories.

1 ) Design

The first one is rather obvious, but maybe the most subjective / controversial one perhaps and so one that is not really easy to just fix. The Seven theme is just aesthetically boring. It was such a let down to many people I know installing Drupal 8 and seeing the same (yes many people don't even realise there are some differences) admin theme and bartik when installing with the default (You have no content published -> more on this up front). It needs some great design, better usage of icons and so on..wont go too much into it

2 ) Naming / Drupalisms

Maybe this one is not so much of the scope of an admin theme so I am a bit reluctant to put it here.. But the configuration of content models (content types etc) is too couple into what drupal people know, or even the implementation of these types. I am thinking for example of the field configuration. Lets compare Drupal with contentful as an example :

Drupal :

Contentful :

In the contentful example an administrator is immediately picturing what will be appearing in terms of UI. In drupal not only it is the first thing you need to know you also need that mapping in your head (List text = dropdown, Number list = dropdown of integers etc..some of which are totally not clear and easy to picture..even after doing drupal for some time)

3 ) Empty states

Empty states deserve better design. They are quite important in terms of a user's (admins) experience. Its essencialy about those weird parts of an app, that mostly come into the design process as a "later" stage thought. Things like that page when the user just signed up for the first time and everything is empty, errors, when the user clears all data and a list becomes empty and so on..

I will just link some articles I think its relevant here, maybe "empty states" doesn't ring a bell to some people reading this

https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/why-empty-states-deserve-more-design-time/
https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/22/the-most-overlooked-aspect-of-ux-desig...

In drupal, and more specifically in the drupal admin theme this would related to empty lists, empty structures etc..Which normally deserve only a line of text. They need design process. They need to be taken seriously as important parts of the user experience. there are many ways to make these temporary states relevant like providing more info on the platform (educating the user), call to actions etc..

I wont repeat what I have seen in the moodboard which i think are great ideas as well, sry but I wasn't able to find how to make an account and contribute with a bit more there..

I hope my contributions here where a bit helpful. It looks like CMS's are popping up a lot now, they are a bit hip again (?) and thats great for Drupal but it also means we need to do a better job in staying relevant and keep up with other great solutions out there that have great design in mind. Drupal needs great design as well, and for the admin theme I think thats prob what I see lacking most. I do see huge improvements over Drupal 7 (huge!!) but showing Drupal 8 to other users I have seen faces like "is the same?", I think just hoping for something more fresh.

I really don't want this to sound like I am neglecting the great work being done by everyone that has contributed to the Seven theme and any other parts of Drupal. I appreciate and love the hard work that has been consistently put out in there.

We discussed possible approaches towards redesigning Field UI during this weeks UX meeting: https://youtu.be/BechK49LvY4?t=31m14s

It would be interesting to see if we can organize some kind of (virtual) UX sprint to break down what's in Field UI and put it together again in more user friendly ways. It would result in some nice and tough challenges for the Javascript Initiative team as well.

Just some thoughts on this...

Text Formats
I think there is a lot of clutter around field metadata. Things like text format details. While most users may not need these details until they're interacting with the field, I feel like they can needlessly add to the length of the form.

Multi-value Fields
With more complex entities with many fields, it can be intimidating to edit. Multi-value fields can be to blame in a lot of cases. On one of my entities I have two multi-value fields appearing one after the other. With a full entity of content, it's easy to miss the end of one and the beginning of the next multivalue field.

I think there are two main categories of site admins:

Content Admins who do things like:

• Edit nodes and blocks
• Place blocks
• Manage taxonomy
• Manage menus
• Maybe creating landing pages (using layout manager in future, or contrib modules)

Site Builders who do things like:

• Configure bundles and fields
• Views configuration
• Roles configuration
• Set up content moderation workflow
• etc.

Creating a good experience for content admins is easier because they have fewer tasks to manage, but there is no built-in role for this type of user so it is different on every site. And sometimes these users are just given the default 'Administrator' role which leads to them being overwhelmed with options.

Creating a good experience for site builders is much harder because the configuration they're doing is more complex and there are so many types of tasks they can do (basically, database admin tasks through the UI). At the same time, someone doing site building on a Drupal site will probably be more willing to invest time in learning these things, so in some ways it's okay to have a steeper learning curve.

It would be helpful to have a default content admin role so that we can make some assumptions about the experience that we're improving.

Something like WordPress' Gutenberg would be a killer feature (would of course need a reactive JS framework). I think the paragraphs module is best suited to be the base of such an undertaking.

Neos CMS, mentioned on Slack #admin-ui by @pieterdc:

It once started as a project to improve the editorial experience of Typo3 but has continued as a standalone project. In this admin UI demo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVG65hVa73Q you'll probably recognise a bunch of things Drupal is also working on or already has: inline editing, outside in (settings tray), collapsible admin menu (toolbar), media library, workflow, multilingual, workspace, ...

The new Laravel Nova admin is very cool. https://nova.laravel.com/. The keynote from the latest Laracon goes through it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLcM3mpZSV0.

Ducking into this thread after a few months of silence to review, since it impacts the ongoing editorial improvement/ JS modernization initiative. One of the really important things for us to keep in mind is the distinction between Drupal Site Building and content management/content editing.

1 — Although some sites have "I wear all the hats" folks who do both of those things, they are at the very least two different "modes" of interacting with the site. Defining a content type and creating that type of content, for example. I think taking new directions to streamline the "Site Building/Click-To-Dev" tools is the least risky, because our community has a really deep pool of direct knowledge about where the pain points in that process are.

2 — Jeremy's comment about multivalue fields in #7 is a really important one, IMO. One of Drupal's strengths is the ability to bang together fairly complex content models without any development work — and have a content editing/management interface automatically generated for you. Unfortunately, a lot of the widgets and standard UI widgets we use during the content editing process (like the table of fields for a multi-value field) are fairly "chrome-heavy" and cluttered.

The emphasis on "letting people focus on the content" is something that we can bring to both the "vanilla" field-based editing interface and any fancy in-place inline editing, IMO, by figuring out how to eliminate unnecessary chrome and show more of the content itself, even when we're presenting things in the vanilla "backend."

Instead of just only the administration menu, we need an admin dashboard where we can manage things directly. Where there is a direct access to the link for the administrative task like create content, managing user and all the configuration and structure stuff. Where admin can also track the details like last comments, current active users, number of contents, recent contents etc. Maybe with a left side vertical menu bar to provide the sections wise display.

The Ibexa content tree in the admin UI. https://netgen.io/blog/new-releases-of-netgen-stack-for-ez-ibexa

This issue is about improving the seven theme which is no longer the default admin theme. Can we close this, or, if it is still relevant, update the summary and move this to the core ideas queue?

The parent issue is closed.