Posted by Bevan on April 2, 2008 at 9:41am
Better node admin content form module looks like a promising initiative to improve usability on the admin content page, despite the awkward name.
As does Form Table module which going by the description, appears to be implementing a project idea I had had for SoU:
Managing Many Items With Tables, with;
* links to items and related objects
* data display columns
* operations individual items
* operations on multiple items
* filters
* table headers
* sorts
* pagination
I have not yet tried out either module, but hope to find time to do so.
Comments
Good and bad :)
It's great to have more way to filter. But some user already find this admin page in D6 difficult to grok, and the module won't help them. I wish there was an easier way to filter.
I can't think of a better
I can't think of a better way to filter though I'll sadly agree filtering is kinda clunky atm. Ajax filtering can help; I think this page screams ajax. I'm not sure why this page is segregated from the structure of content (as seen in the books overview page). I understand you can turn books off and that's why they aren't merged but it would seem that the book's overview of content could override this page so that they remain in the same place so you can still filter and perform administrative tasks on bulk nodes. Two things I think are important for this page going forward: Ajax/AHAH (obviously with fall back to non-js) and centralization of tasks. When I finally punch through all my crap at work i'm going to try to get back to some UI improvements for drag and drop on the books page but I think a centralization from this page is critical.
Just based off the screenshot of that project I would change the following (would like to add to in a few months):
*Context menu with more operations -
*Tag / taxonomy entry through this page similar to Gmail's system
*Delete content
*edit content
*preview content
*duplicate content
*change permissions on content
*publish / unpublish
*Restructure content
*Change content type
This screencast illustrates some of what i'm talking about adding to a menu/tabled type approach via a context menu: http://elearning.psu.edu/projects/node/19
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
double selection is strange
What puzzles most people who use the filtering for the first time is the fact that you gotta choose two times: first the radio box on the left and then the dropdown before you can filter. This is surely unneccessary, it should pe possible to just choose a dropdown and to be ready to go.
But I'm sure if once someone starts working on it, he will solve that issue, too.
Life is a process
Life is a journey, not a destination