DrupalEd: a rundown

Hello, Wim,

Thanks for the feedback, and for the offer to help -- you identify many areas where we would love some assistance in the form of new code, improved styling, and/or clearer config options wrt roles, users, and documentation.

If you want to work with me to set up a roadmap, we can either do it here, or we could use the OA wiki for it -- it's publicly accessible, and you can create an account there -- if you have an OpenID, that will also work.

RE your feedback:

Installation

1. I find the installation to be confusing, and very hard for users unexperienced with Drupal, PHP and/or MySQL. I think it would be better to tell them to unzip the folder, import the DrupalEd .sql file using phpMyAdmin and then to edit the sites/default/settings.php with the correct username and password. This is better than having them go through the installation script and having them drop all tables and do the import just to fill in the settings.php

   All of this can be addressed with a good install profile. The best way to tackle this issue (and, btw, many of the others you mention here) is through a good install profile. If we work with you to sort out some priorities, will you help write this profile?

2. In the "More information" section it might be a good idea to put a link to the this group, next to the link to Drupal since most questions will be about the DrupalEd distribtion and not always focussed on Drupal itself.

   This is a good idea.

First look

1. After checking the site for the first time, and I've mentioned this before, my reaction is: "cluttered". There are just too many options out-of-the-box, and most of them are unclear or undocumented. For instance: not everyone knows what a "wiki" page is. Will every educational site be setting up a "personal image gallery"? Or podcasts? Currently I know of but one university that publishes its courses in podcasts and puts them online.

   This could also be handled via a good install profile, and by more meticulous separation of content types by role. IIRC, this is currently done for the audio role, the wiki role, and the instructor role. This role-based separation of content could become more pervasive; this, in combination with a strong install profile, would go a long way toward meeting a broader array of needs in a more intuitive manner.

2. After logging in for the first time, there are even more options. First I notice that there are too many blocks/menu options, of which most could be grouped together.

   No -- this flies counter to one of the pieces of feedback I consistently received from a range of reviewers: only present users with what they need to see. Not every site admin will be a content maintainer. By separating these functional elements into separate blocks, we can leverage the built in block-visibility-by-role functionality, and provide a cleaner UI to less sophisticated users.

   For instance one "create content" menu, with submenus "create general content" and "create group". it's very unclear what "course" is doing in the "groups" menu.

   This is a documentation issue, not a block/menu issue -- see above comment.

   The "Administer" and "Maintainer" links should fall below the "My account" menu, so you are left with 2 menu's: "My account" and "Create content".

   No, for the reasons listed above. This was how we had initially set up the site, and the overwhelming majority of early testers (from University professors, from K12 educators, from English as a Second Language Learners, from K12 students, from university students, and other Drupal users) preferred the UI as shipped with the site as opposed to lumping numerous items into one block. What you are suggesting in this case flies directly in the face of countless hours of usability feedback I received. If there's something I'm missing here, then configure up a site with the options as you lay out and we can have the discussion with a more concrete point of reference.

   I'm also not sure if you need a direct link to "Manage my bio" since you already have the "My account" link.

   Agreed. We are working on a maintenance release in preparation for the Drupal 5.2 release, and this change is already in place.

3. Onwards to the groups. As mentioned: it is very unclear what exactly the difference is between a group and a course, and why both are below the "group" menu.

   Documentation issue -- how should this be worded?

   When creating a course I really have no idea what the "Highlighted Content" select box is or does, and what I should select there.

   This is a documentation issue -- there is some documentation about this that ships with the site that certainly could use some improvement, and all suggestions/help are welcome.

   If only views that begin with "group" should be selected, then at least you could form_alter it do only display those, and use the description area to explain what is expected from the user. Again, if the argument field should not be altered, you could use css to hide it for instance.

   form_alter == yes; css in this context is a hack. Control this at the code level. Really, I'm just waiting for this patch to land: http://drupal.org/node/138028 -- if there is other code that needs to be written to achieve what you are describing, then let's sort out some specific goals and get it done in the most effective way possible.

   The same goes for the log message: the fewer options presented, the better. Also note that even though you're creating a course, there is no further reference to the name "course" but only to 'group".

   Agreed, and I'm open to suggestions -- better breadcrumbs? the locale module? changes in the theme? There are a few ways through this

4. Creating general content: again there are way too many options here to be user-friendly. For instance: what is the 'group' option doing there? And the course? Both have their own menu so they shouldn't be displayed twice. I'm not sure if all these other options should be seperated, but instead all be options to create a store for instance where you attached images, files, add a schedulde,

   Agreed. I've never liked how this looks. The tension occurs between group-specific content and content that is not specific to a group. I'd love to get a cleaner UI on this.

   .. Also when create an "Image" I see no option to actually add images? Because I know tinymce I know I can select the "tree" icon but I'm not sure if this is the expected course?

   This is a peculiarity of how node_images module works. You create the node, and then add images in a second step. For future releases, we are looking pretty strongly at either the image module or (more likely) a combination of imagefield and imagecache.

Wim -- if you have some specifics in mind, then I think a great way to proceed would be for usto set up a site where we could work on these specifics together. We'd be glad to put some server space behind this to centralize the effort. Some of your ideas require new code; many of them require documentation and changing some config options. Having a specific site in place where we could reference the UI on the screen visible to User X in role Y would go a long way toward streamlining the conversation, and getting some productive work done.

With that said, DrupalEd isn't for every need within every learning organization. If it saves people time (and many people have said it does), then great. If it doesn't line up with your specific use case and you can do it faster some other way, then do what makes most sense within the context of your organization.

If, however, you want to put the time into making this general config a stronger setup, then let's set up a dev site and get working.

Cheers,

Bill

FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

Hi Bill,

I would be glad to help on the technical aspect (writing form_alters or install profile for instance) once it has been decided what needs to happen. Refering to your initial post "What are the initial goals?" you say:

I also think that it's pretty clear that, while it might be possible to put all this functionality into one site, the complexity of the site would be intimidating to novice users. At the outset, I want to throw out the idea of housing this functionality within different sites. This way, a teacher who wanted to use Drupal to run a course wouldn't need to deal with the added overhead of, for example, school management functionality. Another advantage of having smaller, more targeted install profiles is that it eliminates the need for a bloated distribution. We all love Drupal for it's leanness(or at least I do :) ), and this should not be sacrificed in a distribution.

I believe that currently DrupalEd is intimidating to novice users. This is indeed partly a documentation error but this also indicates there is a lack of intuitiveness and userfriendliness. I believe our next step is to define which install profiles we'll be wanting.

Hi, i'm setting-up a University Department web-site using Drupal, I'm in the same situation of wmostrey about using DrupalEd for the first time: I can't understand where and what I need to configure..

I decided to reinvent-the-weel, I started setting up with:
- the department "portfolio" using Book module
- users profiles trying to use Profile, bio and finally NodeProfile using this tutorial

For Courses I setting up courses as a "Taxonomied OG" the group node is associated to a taxonomy: a cloned view lists only taxonomies and choosing a Taxonomy Term it's groups (courses) Taxonomies indicates the "course-path" (Mathematics, Mathematics Specialistics, Master in Matematics, etc .. I hope that my bad english can let you understand what I mean).

Each course have severals content-type avaiable, since now they're CourseDescription (Course Program with the Year), News (news about the course, as lesson suspension or others), Events (as exams, I'm not setted up OG-Events already)..

I'd like to know wich are the differences between my solution and the one that DrupalEd uses..
Bye

ps: I read about the problem about OG Breadcrumbs: I created a patch that allows to override OG default base-breadcrumb ("Groups" linked to "index.php?q=og") you can find it here..