Upgrade Your Drupal Skills

We trained 1,000+ Drupal Developers over the last decade.

See Advanced Courses NAH, I know Enough

Usability: Rearranging the Node Form

Parent Feed: 

I've been working on implementing Leisa Reichelt's design for the new node add/edit form. Gábor Hojtsy started the process off by creating a patch to move the submit buttons up to the right, and separate the node form into a "Content" and a "Meta" tab. I refined his patch to make the horizontal tabs a reusable form element, and in the current state of the patch, the node form looks as pictured:

The effect is a more streamlined version of the node form: all the traditional "content" fields—you know, the ones that people actually pay attention to—are presented to the user without any distraction. Should a content author need to mess with the date a node was published, or other information that Drupal allows to be altered (but isn't typically necessary to fill out), they can click the "Meta information" tab, which switches tabs through javascript. The "Save," "Preview," and "Delete" buttons are all located at the top right for easier access.

The next step in implementing the design was the pseudo-collapsible fieldsets on the "Meta information" page. The basic concept was to leave information available in a readable state, yet not take up so much room so as to block other information from the screen. While the layout I created isn't exactly like the design, I believe it cleanly captures the essence of the idea without requiring too many changes to the underlying code. With my current patch, the "Meta information" tab appears as pictured:

I like what I've done a lot, but what is usable for one person might be completely unusable for everyone else. I'm sure there's room for improvement, so please feel free to comment on either of the issues (horizontal tabs) (modified fieldsets) or add a comment to this post to voice your thoughts or concerns. There are many opinions on what makes for good usability, and the more opinions we get, the more accurate a picture we can make of what is most usable overall. Thank you!

Author: 
RSS Tags: 
Original Post: 

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web