interface

Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design"

These rules were obtained from the text Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman. Shneiderman proposed this collection of principles that are derived heuristically from experience and applicable in most interactive systems after being properly refined, extended, and interpreted.
To improve the usability of an application it is important to have a well designed interface. Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" are a guide to good interaction design.

1 Strive for consistency.

The idea of these new quiz results are great, it enables users to create quizzes on their sites which have a range of goals as opposed to having one goal when taking the quiz. Configuring tests to use this, is confusing, and maybe even broken. There should be an easy to define path to create quizzes with result options instead of pass fail.

At the end of a Business Innovation Factory talk, Walt Mossberg and Jason Fried (from 37 Signals) talk about Open Source Software. Video here, at approximately 3/4 from the beginning.

Here's a quick n'dirty transcript of a small part of the talk:

Okay, so the story goes like this:

1) The SPAjax module (4.7 only) has a feature that allowed you to apply (Scriptaculous) Javascript effects to Drupal messages - allowing the "fade yellow" technique, pulsating, or shaking of the message divs. I missed this on my Drupal 5 sites and wanted to implement it in JQuery. Easy, right?

2) JQuery's effects library is called Interface. I couldn't find a version of Interface that would work with JQuery 1.0.1 (the version in Drupal core).

3) In order to update the JQuery in core, you need John Resig's compat-1.0.js script which allows backwards compatibility with scripts written for JQuery 1.0.x (such as everything in Drupal core). So now we need a module to include the compat-1.0.js file.

4) Interface.js is a relatively large file ~80K. It's "parts" (individual effects) are available separately, but this only increases the possibility that two modules will include the same (or worse two different versions of the same) scripts. So... now we need a central module to include a single interface.js file on the page when needed.

So here's what we ended up with:

This is the current XML-RPC interface used in Drupal Manager. The information provided here may differ from the implementation in the modules, but I'll update to match this post. This document is what I'll stick to when implementing the interface.

I just came across this post: http://drupal.org/node/53836

I agree with the basic points. From an administrative post (and only trying to maintain a small site) I've already wished that I could go to /admin/node and for a group of nodes make all the same common changes (e.g. author, taxonomy, etc).

From what I know about Drupal, it would be simpler to imagine trying to code this if actions could only be applied to nodes of one type.