Reorganize admin menu items

[ewinslow]

These are frustratingly unintuitive atm.

[cash]

We should compare against Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and so on.

One option is to divide the menu into sections and show the top 2 or 3 menu items per section.

[ewinslow]

I like the sections idea. Here's my first shot(somewhat based on Wordpress):

First Section

• Dashboard
  • Dashboard
  • Statistics
  • Reported Content
• Settings
  • Basic
  • Advanced

Second Section

• Appearance
  • Menu Items
  • Widgets
  • Preview
• Plugins
  • Basic
  • Advanced
  • Groups
  • Log Rotate
  • Garbage Collector
  • Elgg Dev Tools
• Users
  • Add New
  • Newest
  • Currently Online
  • Profile Fields
• Utilities
  • Diagnostics
  • Log Browser

I'm having trouble coming up with semantic names for these sections. But it doesn't feel like we need more than two. Wordpress has three, but that's because it has a "Content" section, and Elgg is not analagous to wordpress in that area.

[cash]

I think a task-based analysis would really help in the organization. For example, why are settings given such a prominent role? How often does a site administrator change a site setting once in production? The answer is never.

There are two phases: site setup and maintenance (developers have a different set of needs so I'll ignore them).

What are the tasks that an administrator needs to do on a daily basis?

• help users that can't validate/lost passwords
• look at visitor trends
• deal with spam
• communicate with users (announcements, mailing list)
• work through user feedback (contact us form, reported content)
• feature content
• deal with troublesome users
• CMS-kind of stuff (sitewide calendar, blog posts)

When setting up the site, an admin will be

• installing and configuring plugins
• trying out themes/editing the current one
• setting the menu and profile fields
• setting up site pages (about, contact, ...)
• trying to figure out how to do x
• trying to figure out how to fix x

Maybe rather than beginner vs advanced mode, maybe we need a setup vs maintenance mode.

[ewinslow]

I like this distinction a lot! "maintenance" might be confusing because a lot of people think of "maintenance" as in "the site will be down for maintenance", but you're thinking of it in a "this is what I do while the site is live" kind of a way.

Perhaps that's why Wordpress has "Settings" down at the bottom -- just because it simply doesn't need to be accessed very often.

Round 2:

Live

• Dashboard
  • Dashboard
  • Statistics
  • Reported Content
  • Featured Content
• Users
  • Add New
  • Newest
  • Currently Online
  • Unvalidated

Setup

• Appearance
  • Preview
• Plugins
  • Basic
  • Advanced
  • Groups
  • Log Rotate
  • Garbage Collector
  • Elgg Dev Tools
• Settings
  • Basic
  • Advanced
  • Profile Fields
  • Menu Items
  • Default Widgets
• Utilities
  • Diagnostics
  • Log Browser

[cash]

Preview is only intended for developers. Maybe add a third section "Developers" for plugins to extend that provide development tools.

[ewinslow]

I agree, but I still always found myself going to appearance to find the theme preview. Another section sound like not a bad idea - since that is the other stage of a website's lifecycle.

[brettp]

Just to summarize, (and correct me if I'm wrong) we've decided upon 3 sections: Live, Setup, and Development in the organization Evan's "Round 2" has, with the exception of Dev tool items under Development. I don't care much for the names of these sections, but I do like the distinctions they make.

If this is agreeable, I'll take care of it.

[cash]

Yes on the 3 sections. For better names, how about:

• Administer
• Configure
• Develop

[brettp]

I've been working on this and have a few questions:

• The appearance section has been removed and its subsections put in settings. Semantically this is correct, but I like the distinction between backend settings and user-facing configuration options.
• Plugin setting subsections are moved into the plugins section. Is this desirable? Another thought I had was to move them all into the Settings section.
• Some of these features can be replaced by widgets. Do we want to offer widget and section support?

[brettp]

(In [svn:8654]) Refs #2991. First round at rearranging and grouping admin menu based upon tasks.

[ewinslow]

1. I appreciate that distinction as well. We should strive to maintain it.
2. Putting them in settings makes sense. It's probably more intuitive from a user standpoint as well.
3. I'm not sure what this is referring to, so it's hard to comment. Sounds like a post-1.8 issue, though.

[ewinslow]

It looks like the approach here was namespacing the menus so there's actually 3 now. Any reason why the "section" parameter was not used for this instead?

[brettp]

Using section didn't output headers. I suppose this could be added as a menu option or as a view override for the specific menus. Thinking on it more, menu headers might be a common requirement...

[cash]

Should be very easy to do - just need to add the headers code to the menu group code and then pass a boolean to elgg_view_menu().

elgg_view_menu('page', array('show_headers' => true));
...
echo elgg_echo("menu:$type:header:$section")

[brettp]

Added as new ticket: #3088

[brettp]

(In [svn:8664]) Refs #2991. Using section for admin menu.

[brettp]

(In [svn:8665]) Refs #2991: Readded the appearance menu under configure. Moved plugin settings under configure/settings.

[brettp]

(In [svn:8666]) Refs #2991. Missed this from previous commit.

[cash]

'Appearance' is going to misleading to users if there isn't anything theme related under it

[cash]

The recent changes have broken the menu highlighting of selected items. It used to keep the parent menu open for selected items.

[brettp]

Re appearance: Have any alternative names or do you think these options should just fall under settings?

Re highlighting: #3103

[cash]

No alternative name comes to mind. I think the distinction between user facing and core settings is reasonable. It's just that most web applications that I've used have their theme stuff under 'appearance'.

[cash]

(In [svn:8686]) Refs #2991 restored plugin settings language string needed for page title

[brettp]

I think we're set on the basic concept so I'm closing this ticket. If there are other thoughts about the current organization, please reopen this ticket. If there are specific issues, please open a new one.