It was for this Reason that Paul Rowell’s seminar on ‘Improving CMS User Experience’ at the recent Drupal Camp in London stood out as being of interest. What are the admin modules of choice that you need to add in to Drupal?
Getting the CMS user experience right can often be a vital element in a successful website. If staff aren’t happy using the website then content and updates will become slow and irregular.
Often, technology ends up being blamed rather than the user’s reluctance to go the extra yard to learn the CMS tools themselves. With a relatively small amount of time investment for a task that might seem like ‘moving the mountain to Mohammed’, it should really be seen more as a case of ‘a stitch in time saves nine’.
Every website has different requirements, and the following list doesn’t need to be installed on everyone sites but let’s take a look at some of tools that can be added and find out why they might be useful to you. Here are the top ten:
Personally I love the look of this menu as the one it looks like a Wordpress administration layout. Their CMS user experience always comes back as positive even for those users that have had very little website administration experience in the past.
Recommended by Paul was Adminimal, a Drupal theme which makes inroads into making the existing menu system clearer.
This is a template change to make the administration area more modular. There’s also some great extensions too. I haven’t used this module yet but from the image it looks like a good addition especially if your admin might be working from tablets and mobile devices.
We’re currently using this on a couple of projects and for me it’s an absolute must, ‘…an extensible framework for managing files and multimedia assets…‘ Users will be familiar with this type of control over their media files from using other websites, blogs and CMS tools out there.
This one wasn’t a suggestion from Drupal Camp but something I’ve discovered in the meantime. I’ve worked on sites previously where the Administration help has been expanded and it’s vastly helped admins, especially if video clips are created also.
Drupal Project Administrative Help
Phew, done! As with any online too, there are always other projects, modules and add-ons that we have noticed as we go about our Drupal projects. Here are some of the best we have seen recently that you might want to give a spin on your sites in the future:
If you also want to check out Paul’s slides from his talk, do grab them here on Slideshare - http://www.slideshare.net/PaulRowell/drupalcamp-london-2015 - or visit his site here - http://www.paulrowell.com.
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