I was thinking about the following. Often when we want to share on the web, it needs to happen fast, simple and instant. Think about this as being a journalist who wants to publish an article. Or consider a student that is taking notes during a lecture. Actually we are confronted with this reoccurring pattern quite a lot. We need to be able to quickly enter and navigate content. The challenge for Drupal is that it should be able to accomplish these tasks more efficiently than it does now. The adaptation of the user interface should be easier and the workflow should be enhanced.
I can distinguish the following features that would be required in order to accomplish this:
- Auto-saves edit progress every x seconds
- Post via e-mail -- the Mailhandler project does this already
- Toggle fewer/more post editing options. It is way too cluttered now.
- Ability to track your “editing” progress efficiently
- Save as a draft instead of unchecking “Published”
- Ability to reset form
WordPress has a “QuickPress” section on its Dashboard which basically allows you to post new content in an efficient and fast way. It is dead simple. I am a strongly supporter of enabling this behavior in Drupal as well, but I would love to discuss this with other Drupalistas. What would be the best approach to realize this? To what point has this already been done? Do you seen any other areas that could be improved?
Share your thoughts!
Comments
Most of this is a matter of
Most of this is a matter of installing the correct (already existing) modules and configuration.
This is a very interesting feature. Did you try out autosave?
The mailhandler module does exactly this, indeed.
I think this is a matter of roles and permissions. If you create new content while logged in as an admin user (uid 1) then you will indeed see all options. You can create an editor role with just the bare necessary permissions so he sees the node/add form as just the subject, body and the submit button. As far as I can see no new module is needed for this.
This is what diff and perhaps workflow/rules are for, depending on how much control and features you require.
That's what the save as draft module is for.
This is as simple as
$form['clear'] = array('#name' => 'clear',
'#type' => 'button',
'#value' => t('Reset'),
'#attributes' => array('onclick' => 'this.form.reset(); return false;'),
);