Drupal 7 has introduced a much better user experience, especially for site builders and content administrators. The much clearer separation between backend and frontend is one example from a long list of improvements.
We have also seen many contributed modules that quickly have adopted to the new features and tools provided by core. However, I believe there is still much work to be done and a lot of education needed about how to best use all this when developing modules. Most developers are left to discover this on their own, and it is easy to overlook things that are needed that are not the focus of the module, but will mean that the user experience especially for visitors are somewhat limited.
One example of this is the user account. There are many core features, such as Overlay, Signature, Status and Roles settings that are not available in Manage Fields for user accounts. This, together with all contrib modules lacking this too, makes it harder to organise and style the public, private and edit profile pages for users.
Then many module developers doesn't always make their configuration and/or administration pages available in logical places.
Thirdly, we are already seeing modules inventing new UI variants of what core already provides. Some are really good improvements, while others simply add more complexity for administrators to learn as there then is more than one way of performing the same tasks.
I believe it is important that we try and do something to prevent that this is escalating. To do this we need to create guidelines for how the Drupal 7 UI should be used, recommendations about where to modules should put their settings/admin pages in the navigation structure.
As a complement to these guidelines we can also create checklists for module developers that basically lists things then should support to be as flexible as possible when used to build sites, such as making user profile fields available on the Manage Fields page.
Another thing these guides can cover is the raising number of API modules that are collecting functionality that many other modules will be able to use instead of developing duplicated functionality.
I strongly believe that everyone in the community has a lot to gain from this:
- Developers will get great guides and checklists they quickly can look at to make sure they haven't missed anything. In many cases I am sure it will even speed up development.
- Site builders will get modules that are more complete to be able to build the features they are tasked to build.
- Content administrators will get better UI for their work.
- Visitors will get a better user experience.
Basically everyone will win from this.
However, producing these guides and checklists will require a lot of work and need a team including members with experience from all roles involved in developing and managing Drupal based sites.
I am willing to commit time to this from my experience as mainly a site builder.
Lets discuss how we can make this happen.