WordPress-liked Dashboard
public
markpeak - Sun, 2008-03-09 15:08
I want to have a user Dashboard page, like in WordPress. After logged-in, user will see appropriate, stylish and easy-to-use links and panels. This should improve Drupal usability.
Therre is a panels module
Therre is a panels module, you know. I fail to see how the two differ.
quite different
Panels requires lots of configuration to achieve a look similar to what wordpress offers, wordpress offers it without configuration.
There is lots of room for usability improvement in the admin area that is available "out of the box". I think that if this is going to become a SOC task it needs many more details, but let's not dismiss the idea on the basis of an incomplete writeup.
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Open Prediction Markets | Drupal Dashboard
Agreed...
We're in the brainstorming phase at this point. Let's not kick out any ideas unless they're a direct clearly a direct mirror of something already in contrib. Panels doesn't do anything like the attached screenshot without a lot of prep work.
It'd be nice to see this as
Maybe a module (+ maybe a patch to the single user blog install profile) which implements this as pre-configured panels and views. I'm not sure that involves enough meat though.
ui improvement
This project tends to improve ui in user view point. Imagine to have a central page for any users that:
Hmmm.. further clarification?
Here's a screenshot of the admin dashboard from http://demo.opensourcecms.com/wordpress/wp-admin/index.php.
Could you specify what of that you intended to see in Drupal? I only see four links there to things you can do, but of course with Drupal there can be literally hundreds of things you can do.
rootcandy?
Sounds like an admin theme request to me.
I agree
I was thinking exactly the same thing. Perhaps this task could entail to enhance the rootcandy theme or to do some research first which admin theme would suite best to start with (there's also nerdalistic). I like that the mock-up below offers google-analytics-like graphics, +1.
Sounds good to me.
Sounds good to me.
Mockup
I created some mockup here.
Please take a look at Wordpress 2.5
Hi, could you take a look a Wordpress 2.5. I think a dashboard is a great idea, and could serve two purposes.
1) A dashboard could be an initial start place when you first install Drupal. There are a large number of problems with the disappearing introduction page of Drupal. I'd like to see that start page disappear in favor of a richer interface like a dashboard. A permanent dashboard which is a mix of information about the Drupal community, a link to learning materials, an overview of activity on your site, and a subset of available navigation on your website is a good goal. The current admin page is overwhelming for new users and a well design dashboard that target the new user audience would help with Drupal adoption
2) The dashboard could provide a rich subset of navigation. The current administration home page had over fifty links, at last count. It's too much and often leads users to report they feel overwhelmed. We've optimized the administration home page, for the Drupal site building professional. It works very well for the developer who is configuring a site for a customer for 6 weeks straight. But for new users, it's too much. By providing a subset of information, similar to the goals of personal publishing and site management that I assume a Wordpress user has, we can help Drupal to become more widely accepted by new users.
In particular, notice the use of multiple navigation regions in wordpress 2.5. I believe there were 5 navigation regions in the header alone. I think this layout is more effective, for personal publishing, than our current dense layout which targets site developers.
Cheers,
Kieran
Cheers,
Kieran
Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.
Drupal events, Drupal.org redesign
Awesome idea
Hi all,
I am a student interested in this task. All the ideas posted in this group look interesting and all are awesome ideas. It is both frustrating and a daunting task to select one of these ideas for the Summer. I am pretty interested in this particular idea. With a bit of brainstorming I feel this will be a good project for this summer. So I will do a bit of brainstorming talking to my friends and users of Drupal and would like to work on this one. Also I request you people to suggest me what you would like to see with such a module. The mockup looks good. I will derive some ideas from the mockup.
I cross-posted to the Usability group
They may be able to provide more insights on this.
I think that someone could
I think that someone could take Panels and use it to build something like this. It's a place to start in terms of doing the setup, figuring out what we might need, and making that kind of stuff available.
But it's absolutely true; Panels is a framework to build upon. The actual app still has to be built on top of it.
A little suggestion...
For my Drupal sites I've created a dock menu which can be used to store commonly used links for administrators. The dock menu items can be added, removed and changed in the menu settings page. I've created this module to have a much faster work flow when administrating my Drupal sites. I also wanted to get rid of the navigation menu.
The dock menu uses jQuery Interface's FishEye plugin.
Perhaps this module can be used to improve the UX of administrators?
Here's a little example:
Lovely
Hi skilip,
Your Solution is lovely. Really admin-friendly.
Cheers
Wolfflow
Visual design versus information architecture
The Wordpress dashboard accomplishes several user experience improvements.
First, it's a personal publishing dashboard. Drupal does not have a personal publishing dashboard, but instead has a site administration, or what could be considered a site building dashboard. The site building dashboard is optimized to meet the needs of Drupal site building professionals who can spend weeks, or even months on the development of a site.
The Wordpress personal publishing dashboard introduces several navigation regions to address usability problems that Drupal has. In the picture below you can see 5 distinct navigation regions, all at the top, and they are chunked into 4 or less items horizontally. The distribution of the navigation regions is useful, because they are prominent and yet out of the way. The chunking of navigation items into less than 4 is consistent with user experience research that users can remember lists of items if they are chunked, 7 vertically, or 4 horizontally.
In the top left corner, the dashboard is clearly labeled "Dashboard". Compare with Drupal, where the start home page is not labeled and the start home page in Drupal disappears, and can not easily be found after the first instance of content is published. In usability testing we found that users were often confused in the site building particularly between creating content, and creating content types, and did not know how to see what their site looked like. The Visit Site button, beside the site title resolves this problem in Wordpress.
The third level of navigation has clear text with intuitive non-jargon words. Compare to Drupal's 5 categories of administration which are distributed throughout a page. Below this is an indication of how many visitors are currently viewing your content.
On the right top corner, we have user account navigation which provides basics: account link, log in/log out, help, and support forums. At CivicSpace we implemented this kind of navigation with contributed module called mini-menus which emulates the popular Google account navigation. Below this are advanced configuration, with settings, plugins, and user management.
In total Wordpress uses 5 navigation regions to provide 13 navigation actions, all in the top header region of the dashboard.
Why is this important, and relevant to Drupal? While most Drupal's core contributors are site building professionals, most of Drupal's users are content creators. Replacing Drupal's disappearing welcome page with a permanent personal publishing dashboard would help to give Drupal content professionals the user experience they need.
The menu you introduce is aesthetically pleasing, we need more visual design and aesthitic improvements in Drupal. But it does not address the need for personal publishing, instead of site building. Consider contributing your visual design skills to add additional navigation regions to the header of an admin theme like root candy, and I think we will be moving in the right direction.
Cheers,
Kieran
Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.
Drupal events, Drupal.org redesign
Really good insight!
Really good insight Kieran. I definitely agree with your analysis.
Really like the Idea, but we
Really like the Idea, but we should create genuine icons for that. I'de be up to work on it, What would be the list of links ?
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Currently, by default, I use
Currently, by default, I use the following links at installation of the module:
admin (admin),
blocks (admin/build/blocks),
content (admin/content),
create page (node/add/page),
create story (node/add/page),
themes (admin/build/theme),
menus (admin/build/menus),
modules (admin/build/modules),
locale (admin/settings/locale),
But the real goal of the dock menu is that administrators can easily change the menuitems. I'll put a zipped copy of the module (Drupal 5) online if anyone is interested.
Similar Module
Hi all,
There is a module providing similar functionality at
http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu
Perhaps the efforts would be best focussed there.
In particular, it would be lovely to have a choice of 'skins' for that modules,
and the 'fisheye' menu could be one of those skins.
Regards
Alan
Admin Menu while making
Admin Menu while making admin navigation easier, strictly follows the menu system built into Drupal and I don't think the menus can be re-arranged.
Skilip's Dock Module is user customizable which is a huge plus. The ability to have different dock skins with their own icon sets would be great too. All that seems to be missing is a title (admin/block/create page) above the icons.
The names are present
The names are already present but will only appear when on a mouse over event. Today I'll place a copy of the module online
simplemenu allows you to
simplemenu allows you to choose any menu to use. What I usually do is:
Thanks to Ted for such a great Module. I hear there is talk of merging adminmenu with simplemenu in the future anyway.
This is a great project.
This is a great project, it's a thing that drupal might have. Its interface is difficult to use and not good to look. I hope you can develop something similar wordpress 2.5 dashboard, this is one of the best i ever seen.
Good luck!
I have been thinking some of the same things...
Mockup ( http://groups.drupal.org/files/drupal-admin.jpg )
I think we also need to remove Modules from the "look and feel" menu. Modules generally add functionality and should have there own tab.
other tabs of use may be a help view that gives a easy way to read through the core help files.
The show all view just shows what we already have in the admin section and this can be a user setting to decide which view is default.
Administer by module view is gone in favor of an integrated module interface.
Now that I have seen the WP dashboard I think Presentation is a better term than visuals for the sites/build menus (-modules)
Craig Bertrand
An new design for Drupal Dashboard
Hi all,
The Dock menu I already use does not cover all needs for a dashboard, so I've created a new design for a Drupal Dashboard. Allow me to explain:
The Dashboard in my design is a sort of control panel for users with administrative rights. It can be used to store commonly used links or to add block content.
On installation of the module, a Dashboard menu is created in the menu system. The menu is configurable, just like other menu's. The only difference is the option to add menu icons to the menu items.
After installation you can configure the Dashboard by either assigning blocks to it's 'Dashboard' region, (I need to figure out how I can add a 'dashboard' region to the theme regions from within a module) or by changing the menu structure on admin/build/menu-customize/dashboard, or by navigating to the Dashboard Settings page. Here you should be able to change the menu to use, as well as the icons used for the menu items.
By clicking the 'Toggle default visiblity'-button (the little green one) you can tell the Dashboard whether the Dashboard must remember it's last state (shown or hidden) for after a page-refresh. If this is disabled, the Dashboard is always hidden after a page-refresh.
In the permission table you can set the permissions for using an configuring the Dashboard.
It would be really nice letting the Dashboard be user dependent. This way all privileged users can change the Dashboard to their needs. Then the dashboard settings should be reachable from a tab next to the user settings.
Here are the images:
I like skilip's design.It's
I like skilip's design.It's apple style, nice. When i first time used drupal, confused the admin and user area indead. The Dashboard means to seperate the admin and user area like other CMS?
There's a lot of ideas i
There's a lot of ideas i like here. My favorite is the dashboard editor where users can organize their tasks to something that works best for them. My major concern is the icons.
See this article on how icons can go bad:
http://turbomilk.com/truestories/cookbook/criticism/10-mistakes-in-icon-...
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I sort of like the dashboard
I sort of like the dashboard idea, it is a little convoluted in my opinion though, and I doubt many non-savvy users will understand whats going on. This is the administration theme I present to my clients ( with their logo uploaded of course ) and it has gone pretty well, very simple and clean.
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