first time experiences & thoughts

hi everyone, i wanted to post up some thoughts and ideas that i found confusing from when i first started with drupal. this is mostly based on 5 experiences. i know 6 has come a long way from 5, but i don't really have that much experience of 6 yet, so sorry if some of this doesn't apply. so, in no particular order

what's the difference between site building and site config? i found it very confusing to be able to form some kind of differentiation in my mind. ok, so site building, you build stuff for the site, but site config? ahh, like site title, colours, layout right? as it turned out, the one true site config menu item (site information) was right at the bottom of the site cofig menu!

You mean menu's aren't site config? themes aren't site configuration? (you don't really 'build' themes per se in the themes menu).

i think to make drupal more accessible to the uber newbies, i'd like to see more promotion of install profiles, that way, ppl can dl a blog setup, a flickr copy setup, a forum setup etc, then blam! they've got it all up and running no questions asked - and they have the option to build, extend and develop with drupal as and when necessary. when the user-level people think cms, they prolly think wordpress, and expect to be able to install, then get it up and running, so this may make drupal accessable to a lot more individuals, and with the strong drupal background, perhaps blow wp out of the water?

setting up themes is a nightmare in terms of having to click here, click there, navigate to this menu etc. ie. where do i enable the search block - in the theme or as a block? or the block isn't enabled, but i see a search box? i think hardcoding things like title, slogan, mission statement, search box into the templating system is sloppy, maybe this could be created by the user as cck fields?

as a semi-experienced thought - and delghting in panels2, could there be a layout option where users can click on the list of page content, then edit the layout in a panels drag and drop manner? maybe this could be grouped by taxonomy (ie. design layout for a whole section). mhh maybe that's a whole separate module - just a thought.

navigating aroudn the default admin menu is a nightmare, having to click to see the admin menu open up, then click to open up the site building menu, then click etc etc. yes i know about the admin menu module, and other dhtml menus, but why not have one as an optional module, or just one for the admin menu? jquery is packaged with drupal, so why not use it! so an core-optional module?

i was blown away by the tens of extra divs that was put into my code, so, for a simple page, parts of it looked like

hello world

- reading it is a nightmare, feels excessive and messy.

would it be possible to click on a node content type, then be able to directly edit the template in a window or such? i hate the templating system in vbulletin, it's confusing, and prefer to open up a text file personally, but i know people who are afraid to venture into the sub directories. this would then mask the node-NODETYPE.tpl.php requirement, and make it much more transparent.

maybe there could be an "edit template" api exposed for modules? so views could have a "edit template" in the list of views, which would then create / edit a template for that view. personally myself, i prefer the option to open up the template files into an editor, but doing this would make it immediately more accessible, and with a line of "this template is called node-foo.tpl.php and can be foudn in sites/all/themes/..." would ease the user who's interested into manual editing.

modules - ok, so adding modules is great. however, do i use this module or that module? that both seem to do the same thing, so which is better? as a complete newbie, how the hell are they to know? also, when you add a module, what happens? is a new menu created, is a new option somewhere added - not all modules have great documentation. so, i'd like to suggest that in the info file, an extra line, or description is added to state "this module adds a menu in the site config menu called foo, and also allows the option of moo and poo". this would save the confusing option of remembering for a newbie what menu option is in site building or config, and then having to hunt it down.

i'd like to also suggest that there's a template standard documentation file for modules. with such tight coding standards, i'm surprised this hasn't been done!

also with modules, the perms that they expose, some are implicit and automatically granted, whilst others have to be manually granted to the role type. so, newbie heads on over to user permissions, and ticks 'access foo', for the unauthenticiated users, only to unknowingly grant the logged out users permissions to see extra parts of the module they shouldn't because the module quietly granted that user group the necessary permissions - i'm sorry this bit has to be a bit of fluff as i';ve lost my notes and can't think of an example right now.

also, with the access control list, when i'm half way down teh list, and i have 6 role groups i've set up, how am i supposed to know which tick bnox is for which? oh, i have to scroll all the way back up, then find the col, then back down again. so, like phpmyadmin does, can the groups names be repeated every x rows please.

searching for aliases - when you have a few, clicking the pager isn't fun, so a search box on there is necessary.

save / cancel / save and edit. the latter is essential for dev work and makes the life expectancy of the back button much longer (it's used less you see!). so, panels, views, heck, and even node creation would benefit from one - who wants to type up a long 600 word rant, only to find a powercut wipes it all out? you hit ctrl+s often when you're working with files, so this is only the much-needed equivalent

ok, this is all i can think of for now. hope it's not useless banter, and some positive discussion can be had from it!