Usability

As Brian's previous post says, we've had this idea for Druplash (which means Drupal, Flash, Services/AMFPHP, and most importantly SWFAddress) since last spring. We've both been involved in Drupal in the last several years. Brian got an earlier start, and I was first exposed to Drupal through Kevin Reynen's vision for its use at Bradley University.

Brian and I get ready to deliver the first incarnation of our presentation on Druplash/Druplex.

My feelings about Drupal are probably best expressed through a comment that webchick made in IRC last weekend, which I will poorly paraphrase here, "Whenever I have a website project, I look at how I can fit Drupal to it."

Drupal's an amazing project, and you get so much with an install of Drupal - user and role management, a very secure login system, the flexibility of using theme functions to easily change output, using locale to translate parts of the user interface you want to change, and FormAPI, which I have just started working with over the past two weeks.

I bring this up because Brian and I had both been using Drupal for at least a year and a half, yet we hadn't really jumped into the community yet. Brian had gone to one Central Illinois Drupal meetup which I couldn't attend due to a musical engagement, and we'd each submitted a patch or two: I did an exceedingly simple patch to Services, and Brian submitted some new functionality back to WebFM.

Regardless, DrupalCampWI would really open my eyes to how vast the Drupal community is and how I could take part.

An interesting observation on handling Menu Items inside of Drupal:

In the Drupal 5 menu administration panel, disabling a menu item is a one-click process.

When you click on the enable link, it takes you to the exact same screen as if you had clicked the edit button on an enabled link, and there is no edit button next to a disabled menu item.

This is poor usability: clicking on the disable button is a one-click process, and if I'm re-enabling a menu item, I in general don't want to move it around in the main navigation menu or change its weight - I want it to be visible again to my users.

I would rather that Drupal give menu items an edit link again which allows you to edit the menu item and choose whether or not to enable it on save, and a dedicated, one-click enable link.

This post was born out of my frustration after accidentally disabling many menu items on the new Bradley Multimedia site, and discovering that the enable link was really an edit link, and that I didn't have the choice.