Hiya! I've been reading up on this group today, and I've noticed most of the activity is aimed toward improving the administration. That's great, because even after working for two or three months with Drupal, it often still takes me two or three guesses and clicks before I'm finally at the page where I wanted to be - among other small frustrations.
However, I'm surprised that not much attention has gone toward the content creation interface. Surprised because a lot of the people who work with Drupal work on larger projects and are often professional or at least hobbyist coders -- ergo, people who can get annoyed by a sloppy administration, but will learn to live with it because it provides the power and features they require. (cf. also http://webschuur.com/publications/blogs/2006-02-11-the_typo_attitude)
This is entirely different for the users who will actually use the site and provide the content: a good first impression of a slick content entry page can be everything. And it's a problem that has been bothering me this summer, because I'm switching over from Textpattern to Drupal, and Textpattern happens to have, well, only a quarter of the features of Drupal but a wonderful administration, especially for content entry. ...and I can already imagine the comments of disgruntled editors who might claim (only half serious - we're all friends :-)) that I've put my ease before theirs.
The Formfilter module has been a good start because it allows you to remove clutter from the entry page that shouldn't be usually be touched by writers anyway. (Although, at this moment, it's not yet possible to configure different "filters" for different user roles, afaik.) But in the end it's pretty rudimentary: display something yes/no. How great wouldn't it be if a designer or webmaster could juggle around a bit with the position of the seemingly infinite amount of those yucky collapsible fieldsets, put them in columns etc.? You can see my take on that attached to this post.
Ideas? Discussion? Some help by a seasoned drupaler to get a module up and running that accomplishes this? (I've only made some small modules for personal use thus far, so I doubt if I could do it by myself - but maybe others like the idea too?)
Sincerely,
Stijn
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Comments
my plan
Hey,
I've been thinking the same thing.
I'm working on portfolio work at the moment, and I've been doing customised versions of the add-content interface for my custom site themes. What I'm thinking of doing, however, is to create a separate module like you said that creates a clean interface that works well with whatever theme. You would be able to further theme it (or skin it) for the specific site you are working on, but it would basically work fine without alternate theming.
My thinking of how to do this is to ignore the installed theme as much as possible and to add an interface bar at the bottom -- or maybe the side -- of the screen. It would be a bit like what you see when you open a tool like Firebug, but obviously with different controls. I've been incorporating basic versions of this system into the work I've been doing so far, but it's a lot of work to do every time, and so I'm currently only doing half a job for each project. But as a concept it works well, and seriously cuts down on scrolling.
I've not really started this yet, because I've got other priorities in the meantime that are more immediately important. But this is something I'm definitely going to do (it makes sense from a business perspective). Or I will at least try my best!
Your suggestion seems like an interesting alternative. Certainly more flexible. Perhaps we need both.
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www.alanpritt.com
other solutions
A module I've found that greatly eases administering Drupal is called Drupal Admistration Menu You might want to try that out.
Kyle Mathews
Kyle Mathews
Content Entry
Thanks for the swift responses!
@ alpritt: I'd be happy to work together if you find the time. I'll do some preliminary testing to see how easy it actually is to cut the regular entry page into chunks in a way that doesn't upset the theme (a css issue) and how easy it is to control the placement of fieldsets in those divs when the page is being built (a php/drupal issue). Beyond that, I don't know how far I'll get without help from a more seasoned coder - I can usually get things done in a semi-hackish sort of way, but when it comes to writing reusable material, well, "I'm trying". In a way, this doesn't seem all that difficult to achieve, but looks can be deceiving.
Sidebars / interface bars
I usually don't particularly like those because they break with the main theme (same goes for that Administration Menu, by the way), which doesn't look all that clean. But maybe if you could provide some screenshots, I could get a better idea of how you use them to achieve a better entry form?
Administration Menu
@Kyle: Hm, I once discarded that module because I thought those dhtml-ish menu's were a thing of the past, but then again, it's probably a lot better than clicking link after link in a messy menu. I'll give it another shot, thanks for the tip :)
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Sure it will break with the theme, but there is no reason why you couldn't easily add an alternate CSS file to make it fit back in. As default the plan is to provide something that is pretty neutral, so that it looks quite good with whatever theme you have in place. But to get it perfect you'd have to do a little tweaking for each site. I'd certainly want to add that ability to add the polish; since I will want to do that myself. In some cases that may mean simply changing the background color of the interface bar; for other projects this may mean spending a little more time on making it beautiful.
I think the most difficult part is going to be how to make it flexible enough to integrate smoothly with unknown modules.
I'll draw up some mockups when I have some more time, but realistically that may be a couple of weeks away.
I'm at the semi-hacking stage myself, and this will be my first re-usable module. But, hey, that's how we learn!
If you can help in anyway, that would be great. Thanks!
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www.alanpritt.com
Some progress
I'm happy to say that my thoughts have been more or less confirmed: by early afternoon I had a working three-column layout and a configuration page that's fully dynamic (it detects and allows you to configure the specific fields your content creation page happens to have). The Forms API is wonderful.
However, now I'm stuck: the edit page won't budge whatever I do. In principle the
function theme_story_node_form($form)should work for both the insertion and edit phases of story_node_form, but it does nothing when a story is edited. Okay, "weird", I think to myself, but let's move on: use the form_alter hook to override a theme à la$form['#theme'] = 'columnize';and then define a functionfunction theme_columnize. Still no go, although I'va ascertained that the edit form indeed has the same ID 'story_node_form'. So now I'm stuck, and admittedly a bit frustrated, because I can imagine not a single architectural reason whytheme_story_node_formshould only apply to the creation of new stories but not to their editing.Help appreciated.
check it out
I figured it out the next day but forgot to report back. Anyway, for those who want to test it: http://users.telenet.be/notquite/wrk/drupal/columnize.zip
After some succesful tests, I might submit it as a contributed module.
Panels 2
You'll love Panels 2! It does exactly what your mockups show. I don't think we'll see a content form like that in core any time soon, and I do like the simple one-column layout to begin with. But it shouldn't be difficult to achieve what you want with Panels 2 and Drupal 6 once they are all done and ready.