Remove warning modal dialogs and replace them with undo

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gagarine's picture

I think we can remove modal dialogs and replace it with a "undo" or trash system. Specially when you delete something (node, menu, bloc, etc).

They have a great article about that at listapart See http://www.alistapart.com/articles/neveruseawarning/

Gmail have this kind of undo and recently add "undo send" http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-undo-send.html .

Exemple

Some issues about modal dialogs

Some related features request

Comments

Gagarine, I agree. However

Bevan's picture

Gagarine,

I agree. However an undo/trash type feature is a huge technical undertaking.

Bevan/

there's always a catch

luco's picture

actually, the article says: "Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo".

this means you can't expect to lose every dialog. for example, when you're installing Drupal, and it checks for system requirements, it might tell you: "sorry, your PHP is out-of-date".

so clicking undo will solve the problem by updating PHP on your server? ;]

other than that, I have of course felt quite dumb several times, either in Drupal or not. your suggestion made me slap my forehead and go "of course!" which is always a good thing when it comes to usability. nice!

so I'd bounce your suggestion with a let's-be-careful thumb-up. :]

Of course you can't remove

gagarine's picture

Of course you can't remove every messages but a lot of modal dialog we can. The best example for me is when you delete a node (grrrh) or a menu. Confirmation message is completely useless here because:
- you are in the same "flow".
- You don't have any "preview" so you can't see if this is the correct node,menu,bloc,...

So you quickly clic twice and notice after you have made a mistake.

I think undo can be use also for node first publication and edition. For this point, i think the best way is to wait 5 seconds before relay create the node or apply modification. Between this time prompt a message with "modifications apply [undo]"

I'm not experimented with Drupal core but I can imagine is not easy to implement this feature. But perhaps it is ;).

see

beeradb's picture

see http://drupal.org/node/35422 for an attempt at this on 5.x. The idea was eventually abandoned.

Ahh crap, I missed that you

beeradb's picture

Ahh crap, I missed that you actually included that link in your original post. My bad.