Roger Soper presented Making Drupal Admin Easier at DrupalCamp SC here at SouthEast LinuxFest in Spartanburg, SC. The purpose of the talk is to make our lives as Drupal Admins a little easier. At the same time, the modules that he presented also create a better user experience for people who enter content. Ultimately, it makes it a more pleasant experience for the users, saving time for admins and users.

Here are my notes from the session:

Admin themes, Garland is default. Rubik is an alternative.

Admin menu (sidebar)

• easier access to items in the admin menu

Block edit

• give you edit / configure links on blocks to make on-the-fly edits

Context

• a way to admin blocks

Taxonomy Manager (tagging)

• built in taxonomy, you have to id every page
• enable double tree (drag and drop)
• managing tag sets

Filter perms

• if you use CCK, each field has permission (if the fields are not re-used)
• filter by role

Check heavy UI

• 10 roles, 3k permissions…need give someone lots of perms, except a few
• it’s like a checkall box at the top of the perms page

View Bulk Operations

• allows you to select all content nodes (even the ones behind pagination)

Content Type Overview

• shows you all content types in one view

Tab Tamer

• you know that view / edit / delete tabs
• allows you to change the text (name) in the tab
• allows you to enable, hide, and disable the tabs on an individual basis

Better formats

• give user different input formats
• allows you to give individual user roles a different default input format, WYSIWYG, Full HTML, filtered HTML

Content lock

• locks down a content type when another user is editing a node, for example, an article

Critical users

• protects critical users from being deleted