I’ve heard and seen a few comments relating to the complexity of Drupal’s Administration area compared with WordPress and how the Admin dashboard is better in WordPress. I am far more of a Drupal fan than WordPress but I would have to agree that the WordPress Admin interface is better, nicer, and easier to use. Having said that though Drupal is no WordPress, and vice versa, so they have their own pros and cons and different purposes.
Drupal has a massive amount of power and functionality, and the Administration area is the control hub to access and control it all, which can be a little overwhelming for some users, especially when you build a complex Drupal website and hand it over to a client. The aim is to make it as easy and less confusing as possible for the client to navigate and use their website.
A good suggestion I can give that I believe improves the look and functionality of the Drupal Administration area is the Admin module and a dedicated administration theme. The standard Drupal install comes with the Garland Theme, this is a really basic theme but doesn’t really look like a nice Admin interface. I strongly suggest installing the Admin module and the rubik theme to go along with it.
The Admin module provides UI improvements to the standard Drupal Admin interface. It uses a nice Admin header that can collapse and expand from either the left or top positions of your website. The Admin header can also be added to your own theme which is helpful if you are not in the Administration area of your site but still would like to easily access Admin sections. I would suggest doing this as it provides better usability to the site for your clients.
A handy feature of the Admin module is the ability to add your own blocks to the Admin header. This can come in very handy for adding extra functionality to the Admin header that would benefit you or your client. You could create a custom view with a block display and show it in your Admin header, you could create your own quick links menu to link to important pages in the site, making it easier and quicker to navigate to.
I also suggest that you set the Administration theme to be used for content editing. This gives a nice consistent and easy to use content editing page for you/your client. An advantage of this is that your website design may not be suitable for content editing and may actually involve additional work in getting the content edit page to function and look usable. It also presents you with the action buttons to the right of the content (as well as at the bottom) which makes it very convenient to save the page, as you no longer need to scroll all the way to the bottom.
Another handy module is the Vertical Tabs module. This provides features like Vertical tabifying all node forms, content type forms and block forms. I’ve only just starting using it but it is already improving the usability, especially for example, when editing a node. It groups all the fieldsets of the node edit page into vertical tabs, so the page is far shorter and you are not bombarded with information you may not need to see. It displays it in easy to use tabs so you just select and edit what you need and move on.
In addition, I have heard a lot of people asking if anyone has or knows how to set up the Drupal admin section to be more like WordPress Dashboard. Providing more useful information for the user relating the their website and content. People have suggested trying to use Panels and the Drupal 7 User Experience Project is helping addressing this issue. This is something I have been wanting to try and do for awhile, and I’ll hopefully play around with it soon, so I will post anything here I may come up with.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve the Drupal Administration area, feel free to post some links or suggestions below.
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