Deprecated - Usability feedback

At the OSCMS Summit, Amazon led a workgroup to discuss various issues with Drupal usability. I led a small group specifically discussing the usability of Drupal administration.

Right now, Drupal lumps all of the administrative items under 'administer'. There is no organization to these items at all, and it can be very difficult to figure out how to do tasks that should be relatively straightforward. To this end, we demonstrated the Administration Module.

This module re-organizes your menus into an easier to cope with set of groupings, and provides a master administration page to help those tasks. There are currently two different settings in the administration module, the 'default' settings, put together by David Reed, the author of the administration module, and the 'civicspace' settings, put together by Amazon based upon user surveys.

At this time, we would like to get feedback from the community at large about what groupings make the most sense to people, and which visual format is the most appealing. There are two screenshots available on the module, the first being David's and the second being CivicSpace's. They both take very different approaches, and feedback what is most appealing -- both to look at and to actually use to administrate a site -- could be very useful in determining how to go forward with Drupal.

As I have been test drupal and installing modules, I find myself going through the whole list 2 -3 times to make sure I have all the modules of a certain catagory to test or read on.
It seems it would be easier or faster if we could group them so if you want something for images then you could look in the image catagory.
I say this knowing that some modules would not fit into a catagory very well. But might be something to think about to help beginners out (like me).

Thanks

It would be useful if Drupal had a display mode setting so that the administrator could view the site as another user or as viewed from another role.  Gallery has this and it's very useful, especially when making changes that will only effect users other than the administrator.  This allows the administrator to view these changes without having to resort to repeatedly logging in & out, or keeping another browser open logged in as another user / role.

I've tried both privacy_by_node and simple_access and neither will allow me to actually limit node access to specific user roles.

They look great on the menus, and appear to be accepting all of my inputs without error, but all nodes, "granted" or "non-granted" continue to show up for all users that have node_access enabled. Disabling node_access for these users doesn't let anyone see anything.

In the 8 hours I've been at this:

Things I've tried to no avail:

While looking around for a CMS tool, I had many requirements.

Although not explicit among my requirements, I perceived that a vibrant community around a tool is a reflection of its health.

Among my explicit requirements were:

- large feature set
- open source (for a long list of technical and othe reasons )
- large addon set and capabilities
- capable of great look and feel with CSS
- documentation

I looked around for weeks trying to get a feel for what is available. The CMS with the unusual, not very mellifluous sounding name won me over because it ~works~.

The Drupal online community seems to be one of the largest of all CMS systems. That provides a sense Drupal will live a long and healthy life.

This Drupal site provides an excellent proof of concept that Drupal really works, both technically, and for people, including communities of people.

----

... There are tools I started to evaluate that I still can't tell you how they are structured. Drupal on the other hand is such that I have developed an intimate understanding of it externally and internally very quickly.

I highly recommend dba.module to anyone learning Drupal, to better understand the Drupal database and how Drupal modules store information. I also recommend that anyone learning drupal read Drupal's superior online documentation several times, in small doses of course. The documentation may not be perfect, but it is far better than what most systems provide.

I would like to create a Download filelist in a block on the right side of my theme.

-------------------------------
- Downloads Product1
-
- Description.pdf
- Installation.zip
-
-------------------------------

the files I will upload using filemanager and attament module and this nodes are classified using taxonomy.

Is there a way to do that?