I was just looking at the information architcture of D7 and I'm surprised that the blocks page is under 'structure'. The other items under structure (menus, taxonomy, content types) are about structuring content, while the blocks page is not. I think the best place for blocks would be under appearance, because this page is mostly about "what appears where and when?". I think that placing the blocks page under appearance would also give new users a little bit of a clue why that page suddenly switches to the default theme instead of the admin theme.

Comments

gábor hojtsy’s picture

gábor hojtsy
he/him
Primary language Hungarian
Location Hungary
commented

Hm, well, structure is also supposed to host many things like Views and Panels, which depending on your thinking might also belong under appearance.

marcvangend’s picture

marcvangend
he/him
Primary language Dutch
Location Amsterdam
commented

OK, but if you put it like that, what is the common denominator of all those pages that end up in structure? Which defining property do menus and panels share, so that end users will intuitively expect them to be in the same category? I can't think of any. I interpreted 'structure' as meaning 'the structure of content' but you are saying that it can also mean 'the structure of the page'. I think that 'structure' itself is such a vague term, that it could apply to even more admin pages (triggers/rules/workflow related, for instance). I'm not sure about Views yet, but in my line of thinking, panels would indeed belong under appearance.

I think we should decide which definition of structure we are going to use.

amc’s picture

amc commented
Issue tags: +Usability
aspilicious’s picture

aspilicious commented

What about configuration => system => blocks? or configuration => user-interface => blocks.
Makes more sense to me. As you're configure what you want to see where and not how it will look.

Bojhan’s picture

Bojhan commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Although I agree that Appearance is somewhat weird item in our top level navigation, since primarily its only a settings page. However for Drupal 7 I think its a bit to late to conclude that this page needs to be turned into a section. Blocks is certainly somewhat the odd one in the crowd of menu's, content types, taxonomy ect - but you should not lift to heavy on the label of Structure, especially if you base it on your own bias of its meaning.

Sadly and luckily the testing we have done on this, did the label create no clear link to either purely structuring solely your content, or building the "structure" of your site which also included the bare bone appearance level items such as blocks or views. So thats also the definition we gave to it, because quite frankly we could call it different if needed, because its mostly about the items in the actual section. The better quantifier is whether the item is a common building block for your website, with that line of thinking blocks is, views is, panels is ect.

Also that in mind, consider the high trade offs of introducing new sections - if we would do it it needs to have very clear wins for more then one item. I am going to mark this won't fix, because I don't want to give any false hopes on the likelihood of this getting into Drupal 7.

EvanDonovan’s picture

EvanDonovan commented

Blocks are not just part of appearance, but also information architecture. I agree with Bojhan on this.