It is a joy to use, circumvents a lot of nasty scripting problems, and can easily enforce presentation consistency.

Jeditable seems like a good starting place since it integrates with jQuery.

http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/jeditable

Respect for all the energy who is floating here ,
I discover Drupal recently, and there is one thing I pray to see in the next version, we speak here about the way to modify more efficiently our content, more efficently how to admin our admin panel but If I read cleary, we forgot something essential.
With the constant upgrade of Drupal we constantly also generate for the non-developper a real stress, am I going to loose my beautifull website with this new upgrade ? When you seen the number of posts on that subject you realise that this process is a real pain in the…
I mad a dream… of a plug in or a functunality who could automaticlly do all that heavy stuff for you, just click… “Yes I want to sleep in that seven heaven too” (a little bit like they do that for the last WP version)

I hope you will excuse my intrusion and my pore english
God bless you all guys

That sounds like a great idea – a function where the admin can ‘build’ the toolbar for specific roles – this could also grant privileges at the same time.

Having said that, there’s a reason why people choose Wordpress to run their blogs. Sure, Drupal can do all sorts of neat things, but if you just want a blog, WP is an absolute joy to look at and use. I think with some of the proposed improvements in ux and with a concerted sales effort, Drupal could take over the blog market too.

As for the rest of the thread:

Major Yay for on-screen content editing. Being able to read a piece of content and edit it on the same screen (maybe via wordpress-like lightbox popup) would be grand. Note, this is on-screen editing, not in-line. I too suspect that in-line editing might well be dangerous.

Having a customizable Header bar would be exceptional. If you could create bars that would be even better. I could create an editor bar for editors, an admin bar for admins, etc…

Header: To me, this is a customisable, credentials-sensitive toolbar similar to that found in MS Word. +1 from me – it’s a creative’s palette.

Overlay window: Rather than ‘float’ something over the web page, why not lead the editor to a form with a facsimile of the current page slung underneath? This would avoid the layering (and the javascript) and preserve the user’s access to the ‘real’ page thus enabling quick review (and there’s nothing wrong with scrolling).

Inline editing: Whenever I’ve encountered customers using Plone 3, they have all switched this feature off – they feel it’s too dangerous – too easy to accidentally make changes (even if it’s not). They never take issue with switching the application into ‘edit mode’.

Love the videos by the way, makes the whole venture very engaging.

I’m not sure where the “header” lives. Is it pinned to the top of the window, like admin_menu is pinned to the side? Not injected into the theme? If so, I like it; if not, I think it’s probably a dead loss, because it won’t integrate into an awful lot of themes. (One of the first things I do with a theme when I’m hacking it is turn the tabs into buttons so they don’t look so bloody confusing when they line-wrap.)

W.r.t. “overlays”: There’s a common prejudice in UX circles against modal dialogs. I’ve never understood it. They seem fine to me for some things, and what I see here seems like that kind of thing. But chx (I think) has a point that they’re not really suited for everything that happens in the system. It’s a web app, not a desktop app, and we’re accustomed to interacting with it in a different way. Keep the modal stuff relevant to the page it’s on top of.

W.r.t. inline editing: Two years ago I tried out a module that added inline editing to Drupal 4.x. Or was I smoking crack and imagining it? It seemed to work reasonably well, but it wasn’t going to work for our users for some stability reasons, if I recall.

I totally get why inline editing wouldn’t work if done simplistically, but Tao Starbow’s idea of combining inline with overlays could address that quite nicely, and it seems to me I’ve heard other people talking about similar ideas.

As someone who has to train end users to maintain the site and add content to it, I can tell you that the more “inline” I make it — and the more I stress the ways that it approximates being “inline” — the easier it is for people to understand how to use it.

W.r.t. the “DMT”: I would love to see something simple in this regard. Drupal just doesn’t really have any good options for global information architecture or variant page layout right now. My apologies to MerlinOfChaos — I know Panels is a hugely complex endeavor and there are some things that Panels 2 does that are impressive and clearly intensely useful (like taking arguments for panels as parts of the URL). But that complexity works against it, and I just don’t see that improving (in fact, see the situation degrading ) in Panels 3.

I actually think something really mundane is liable to bite any page layout component, and that’s stylesheets. One of the big problems I have with Panels is in trying to realize designers’ designs as Panels layouts. I find that there are so many nested containers that I have to baseline reset everythng to zero and build up from there to get the positioning I need. I don’t believe that drag and drop will ever work for realizing designs made by others (which, let’s face it, is what most web geeks in agency settings, like me, have to do) — i just don’t believe it, my experience is so strongly to the contrary on that matter. I will always have to be able to stipulate the position, padding, margins, borders, etc. in the stylesheet, and that’s non-trivially difficult right now.

Speaking as a site builder, the writer/editor/moderator experience is what matters to me: They are my users.

If the UX is optimised for me, it’s a bit like cars being built to suit engineers instead of drivers.

3: The real problem with page hierarchy is that it has fundamental impacts that have to be hashed out. Is it driven by the menu system, or by taxonomy? Does it imply that all nodes become like book pages? Mind you, I think it’s a great idea, but might be too ambitious for D7.

All that having been said: Putting Panels in core in any way would scare the hell out of me.

Panels has been a nightmare for me, a huge time sink, especially Panels 3. Maybe you understand it — I don’t, and I haven’t found a high level explanation anywhere of how it’s supposed to work. I get the vague sense that it’s meant to replace theming. Or not. I don’t know — and I don’t see that I have any way of knowing, because Merlin hasn’t taken the time to spell out his vision anywhere but places I don’t know about and can’t find out about.