Drupal core patches and Vertical tabs

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Bevan's picture

There are many Drupal 7 core issues that are tagged as "Needs usability review". It would be awesome to try and keep an eye on this list and review UI changes that are going in to core/7, with the aim of trying not to degrade Drupal usability further with un-monitored changes, as we usually do in Drupal core. The most important ones to review are the ones that are in the review process, marked RTBC or recently committed.

The reaction I've seen to vertical tabs so far concerns me, in that there are developers who are excited about the UI pattern and want to implement it everywhere, sometimes with disregard to it's UI limitations and assets; such as over-loading it with too many tabs, making it's panes too long, or nesting sets of drawers/vertical-tabs. We saw this happen with collapsible fieldsets a few major drupal versions ago, and this is what lead to terrible UIs like Drupal 5 and 6 node forms, views 1, the old ImageCache UI and AdWords UI.

Actually all of these examples stem from the desire that developers have to put all the options on one page, instead of creating new forms, screens, menu items and local tasks for advanced or more detailed options. Is hook_menu() really that difficult? Or is there another issue at stake here?

Comments

So we are watching that tag

Bojhan's picture

So we are watching that tag closely, atleast I am - a lot are a no go / or no where near core. I believe you should just do a blog post, or assign a page where you explain how to use the pattern. The single largest issue I see with vertical tabs, that it might be used for easier navigation then tabs rather then improving anything of the form.

HIG issue

eigentor's picture

Ouch, I know someone who started working on Human Interface Guidelines for Drupal...
This is a clear case for that, in order to centralise the guidelines that apply to UI patterns.

Moved the page to "UI Elements new in D7" http://drupal.org/node/373788. It is a start, you are welcome to join in to improve that handbook page.

As there are still no Attachments possible on D.O. doc pages (ouch) http://drupal.org/node/379072 I will start putting in images remotely from my server till this is fixed.

What has been taken into account in Vertical tabs not in full consequence is the information Hiararchy: e.g. "publishing options" should been written bigger than the actual vaule, which must be light gray and just big enough to read. On Bevans blogpost it looks about right, but it is not always done like this. If you think differently we should discuss this here.

Life is a process

Life is a journey, not a destination

Awesome! Feel free to leave

Bevan's picture

Awesome! Feel free to leave the image hosted on civicactions.com.

I wanted to add the following to the doc after the second screenshot about long forms, but for some reason could not edit it!?

An alternative would be to move the whole form to a separate page accessible via – for example – a local task, break the form out into 2 or 3 drawers, a combination of both of the above, or – possibly – move small parts of the form that are not used often into one or two collapsible fieldsets.

Also there are good screenshots of nested VTs at http://drupal.org/node/434942

Bevan/

Input format

eigentor's picture

I used the input format "Documentation" in order to be able to use the img tag. So I guess you got to apply to be a doc team member to be able to use that format and edit that post. Just put it to the webmasters issue queue.

Life is a process

Life is a journey, not a destination

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