usability

Because we (drupal logo) New York and Jewcy.com (jewcy logo's) New York, we have a lot in common.

In other words, we are practically brothers and sisters. That's why I came here to the NYC Drupal group (where the users are friendliest, I hear!) to see if anyone might be able to contribute some insight to how we can make our Drupal site a little more Drupal friendly.

In Drupal out-of-the-box, there are four available ways to lay out comments:

• Flat, expanded
• Flat, collapsed (titles only)
• Threaded, expanded
• Threaded, collapsed

To add another wrinkle, there's the option of having the most recent comments at the top vs. new comments added at the bottom. In my experience, on blogs, the most common practice is to have flat expanded comments in chronological order, while on community sites that are not old-style bulletin boards (phpBB, FUD, vB, etc.) the practice is to have threaded, expanded comments posted in chronological order (sub-threads in chron order, comments within threads in chron order).

I just implemented the fast toggling thingie. It can be found in the CVS repository.

Locations where this feature can be tested are administer ➔ content management ➔ posts and administer ➔ user management ➔ users. Note that it degrades gracefully with JavaScript disabled.

A demo of the usability improvements is available at http://drupal.kkaefer.com/. Please review and comment. If you find errors, please report: your browser name and version number; the URL of the page that caused the error; and the error message. Thanks!

Konstantin, just a clarification. You grouped the admin tasks into 5 headings. Is this the proposed way to reorganize the menus?

Hi Konstantin,

How are things going? Please give us your weekly update -- can't wait to test.

Konstantin gave me a preview of his work on Admin Usability Improvements: so far, very impressive. I blogged it here.

at http://drupal.org/node/72735, I would like to have a staging like:
- core (the framework)
- contribute (which is the new one)
- user contribute
- cvs
- sandbox

The contributed-modules should be well reviewed and choosen. Collecting installation-information through the drupal.module would be helpfull, but cause it "also enables users to log in using a Drupal ID" it's often disabled. By default it's disabled, so the data is not representive.

Are there other users feeling like me? Any developers want to help?

There is set up a small testing site for themes at http://theme.drupaler.net/.

I've tried to install all available themes (4.7.2) and categorized them according to their validatation against "Markup", "CSS" and "WCAG".

All Installed themes can be easily tested from a "Test [$theme]" link. If you are registered you are able to vote for a theme.
If a theme is missing, you should post a story with the [$theme].tar.gz

As I've started "W3C compliant CSS"-issue (http://drupal.org/node/70296) as a wish, it was the first one in the chain of validitaion.

The main critism of warning-free css-validation is the "inherit" argument, which changes nothing visible, but is needed by W3C-validation (warning free).

In my opinion there is a difference between an "explicit defined default" and an "undefined default", cause the "explicit defined" says: Yes, I'm sure, that I want to do this.
As we are experienced webusers, we know that the warning of "undefined color" doesn't make visible sense. But it's one of my most-hated questions customers asks me twice a month: "Why does your site so much validation warnings, although you are working active for accessibility?".

Once upon a time ... there was an idea to do it here: http://openusability.org/projects/drupal/

What's about these plans?