ref: http://www.flickr.com/photos/_leisa/3603395014/sizes/o/
http://www.d7ux.org/structure-summit-sunday/

would love to have you participate in the summit if you’re available!

Hope to see you on Sunday at Structure Summit Sunday! http://www.d7ux.org/structure-summit-sunday/

the “structure” tool is visual, and appears easy to use. IMO, those are good things for for non-technical and drupal newbies.

but, who is going to use this tool? seems to me in 2010+ the person this is aimed at will most likely be introduced to drupal via acquia gardens, http://www.buzzr.com, or the like. therefore, I feel it should also be aimed at the set of core modules those types of services will likey use… such as a “core plus” set of modules – even if it is ultimately downloaded by someone and installed in their own environment.

in any case…

scope is important. it needs to be very limited in featureset. and that fact needs to be clear – or it may give the impression drupal wont meet the needs of a new user. this tool seems to be a nice edition for a certain type of user. it takes away nothing, but provides a gateway for the drupal newbie. however, like frontpage, netobjects, or dreamweaver, it could hurt new users more than it helps them, if it tries to do too much.

for example, the publishing tools i mentioned all included some form of “wizard, activex objects, java applets, snippets, etc.” that were either confusing at best or for those technical enough, they were too limited. so if this tool allows you to add widgets or features which require technical know-how to configure and break things if they aren’t configured (properly) are possibly more dangerous – as they will leave a newbie with the impression drupal doesn’t work.

lastly, (minor) i think it needs a new name – something that more specifically describes what it does.

* visual site builder
* visual website configurator

I always make Site Structure the default e’landing screen’ (the thing you see when you login) when I set up a CMS for someone.

That said, perhaps we can build on this (http://www.flickr.com/photos/roprice/3593940220/) a little.

Check out the Site Structure view of a major, proprietary CMS:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/roprice/3593840962/

Not the prettiest, admittedly, but effective and usable (if implemented properly).

Notice the clear distinction between ‘Structure’ and ‘Content’ (and Media, but let’s not get carried away here). This site structure has three pieces:

1. Navigation Menu(s):
- equivalent of “Primary Links”, in default Drulal-ese
- note that there is a hierarchy of pages, although I’m only showing the top-level of ‘Primary Links’. You could expand “Take Action’ to see sub-pages… and move pages around with drag-and-drop

2. Regions:
- each region contains one or more blocks
- in this CMS, as I think it should be in Drupal, regions are set by the theme that controls the front-end website (as opposed to the admin theme)

3. Archive/Hidden
-this is for pages and blocks that correspond to content or a tool (ie a form), but which are “unattached” to a region or menu.
- you might link directly to one of these pages, without wanting it to be part of a navigation structure.
- this is different than an “unpublished” bucket

Just wanted to put forth the possibility of incorporating these three pieces into a Drupal “Structure” area…

As for categories, I do the see logic of putting them under “Structure”, as a secondary screen perhaps — not the default — and with a similar, kind of interface. Makes a little more sense than under “Content”.

Overall would be a great tool to have. When I approached Drupal the first time – making hierarchical content was very confusing. This would help. FYI a simple hierarchy tool exists in the node hierarchy module- which is a good Drupal citizen but less ambitious than this. Would be good to reference it.

1. To me the site builder should be a node and views planning/builder tool. I’m not sure that they should include content type creation. Just feels like its trying to do too much. Maybe having some pre-built cck types and accompanying views that could be just optionally turned on (news. blog, event, announcement, others in the 80% rule etc…) and appropriate pointers to create content type would be a better approach.

2. To the point of requiring contrib modules, what if we could take a similar approach like jQuery UI does – choose what you need and get that in your Drupal download. A kind of install profile on the fly deal – http://jqueryui.com/download. Problem here is – yet another thing to build.

I rather would like to see something like a sitebuilder page, where the list view is displayed as a block in a sidebar (see page list in typo3) and in the main content area you have something similar to the actual blocks page, with the ability to drag and drop the different content objects (blocks, nodes, etc.) into the respective regions (similar to the widgets in wordpress). When you select a page in the list view, the content area displays the selected page for editing.

it is my sincere hope that through the design and development of this tool we can both make an interface that makes building a reasonably complex site using Drupal fast and easy-ish for less-technical people whilst also tackling some of the more challenging interfaces that everyone has to use no matter how they build their sites.

now, the thing that worries me is that if we continue this back and forth, we’ll never end up with time to build what we decide we want to build so…. I have a proposal.

Structure Summit Sunday!

I propose that on Sunday 7 June we block out some hours (TBC) and get together in #drupal-usability on IRC and sort this out. I’ll find a good collaborative design tool so that we can make stuff and share it and talk it all through until we (hopefully) land on a solution that we’re all happy with (or as happy as we can be!)

I’ve never done this before so have no idea how well it will work but I think we have to give it a try if we want to get this off the ground, and I really do…

Designers, developers, insiders, outsiders, Mark & I will both be there…. what do you say? Sound like an interesting idea?

MOST less experienced web builders have trouble enough with information architecture.

If you can easily create a structure, a framework, a set of nav outlines, and then “hang” different kinds of contents off it — that is good.

The create a placeholder for “about” which then flows smoothly to add a page to represent content for “about” is simple.

Or add a placeholder for news. Do you want to add a page of content, or a listing of many pieces of content? Click page to choose from a content type, or click listing to go to a “views wizard”.

I would also feel more comfortable if you could quickly “mock up” an entire site in outliner mode, and then go in and flesh out content in various spots. You might even go from making a listing to creating/customizing the list entry page (aka node/add for such a list entry).

The Google Sites model might be interesting. You either add a page, or a type of container that holds listings, panels, etc. That is the closest I have seen to this.