Look into adding a simple/advanced toggle for admin plugin page

[ewinslow]

And perhaps we should review what the criteria actually are of putting something onto the "simple" page.

[cash]

I agree that we need to review this. It looks like right now the major content plugins get added to simple and everything else goes to advanced.

I never use simple (and I'm not sure it has much use). The idea was to not overwhelm newbies with a long list of plugins. The problem is that it is difficult to predict where 3rd party plugins end up (do I check simple or advanced first?) and currently all 3rd party the plugins end up in advanced.

[brettp]

Yes -- The plan was to make it simple for newbies. We could drop the simple view and add an installation step that prompts users to pick their enabled tools and then provides instructions about how to change the plugins.

[ewinslow]

I'd be ok with dropping the simple view as well. It seemed like the one-liner approach worked well for plugin_manager, perhaps we could go with that?

[ewinslow]

Had another thought: Perhaps "simple" could just refer to how things are displayed, rather than whether they're displayed. So the advanced view has all the dependency tables, drag/drop ordering, etc., but the simple view just has checkboxes and is alphabetical.

[cash]

Definitely. A toggle at the top for simple/advanced.

I this is also an area that could use some task-based usabilty work. I'll try to come up with a set of common tasks and then we can evaluate (or do we wait for GSoC for that?).

[ewinslow]

Gsoc

[ewinslow]

Are we wanting to implement this for 1.8.0?

[brettp]

If we get slots for the admin area usability idea let's aim for 1.8.0, else 1.8.X.

[ewinslow]

If we are letting this depend on gsoc, it's going to be june before it even starts getting implemented, so I'm going to push it back to 1.8.x.

[cash]

I rewrote the advanced plugin view. I did not add a simple/advanced toggle.

The simple view could show a condensed view of plugins and perhaps checkbox-based enabling/disabling like the deprecated simple view.