Posted 07.24.2010 by Jack
Presented by Roger López (zroger)
Admin Themes
- clients/users appreciate a clear visual division between the public front-end view of the site and the admin view
- Garland: out-of-the-box theme that can be used to easily create that visual separation; it's the easy choice, but there are others that are specifically tailored to be admin themes
- Root Candy: specifically focused on being used on the administrative side; creates tabs at the tops for "root-level" admin items, emphasis on readibility, good table structures
- comes with built-in slide-out control panel that you can drop any block on the site into
- Rubik: another admin theme designed for clear, clean admin with a keen eye to styling messaging, help text
Tools, Toolbars
- Admin module; little wrench in the corner that expands out into an administration
- admin_menu module: gives you a nice dropdown menu across the top of your site (front-end and back-end), a number of functions under the Druplicon dropdown menu
Administrator != Developer
- A menu of quick-links specially created for client administrator can be very helpful
- Modules to build an admin interface:
- Views bulk operations - lets you build a view of content (eg nodes, files, comments) and provide checkbox-style operations on all of the nodes
- Draggable Views - lets users drag and drop lists of content into a completely arbitrary sort
- Nodequeue - one step beyond Draggable Views, does the drag and drop sorting but also controls specific pinpointing of what content is included in what queue, e.g. take ten completely unrelated nodes and put them into one queue
- Panels - you can use it to create a dashboard view of content for your administrators, e.g. a dashboard just for users who are comment moderators
Developer tools & APIs
- Ctools - suite of modules that exist to support other modules
- includes AJAX library - ideas behind it are foundation for AJAX libraries in Drupal 7
- Wizard - multi-step forms
- Non-volatile Object Caching
- Dialog API - merges jQuery UI Dialog widget with Ctools AJAX - do simple form submissions through a dialog
- Features - bundle up all the views for admin interfaces, just like with the front-end stuff
WYSIWYG
- they've gotten better at outputting valid (if not entirely efficient) output
- WYSIWYG API is the way to go now; editor specific modules are deprecated
- input_formats - new module that allows you to export input formats as Features code (!!!)
- better_formats - module that attempts to improve the input format specifications of Drupal, default input formats per role (!!!)
- Insert - works in conjunction with imagefields and filefields - get an insert button next to each imagefield, throws it into the body of the node, works with all major Imagefields (!!!)
Random
- Check out http://www.sequelpro.com/ - MySQL management for Mac OS X