We’ve talked through the ‘strategy’ behind the proposed D7UX Information Architecture (IA), now let’s take a look at it in detail. What goes where.

Let’s go through each major section in turn:

Content

The ‘Find Content’ page, showing a searchable, sortable, filterable list of all the content on your site is the ‘landing page’ for the Content section of the site. From this page you can also choose to Add Content (although it is suggested that for Content Creators this also be shown as a Shortcut on the Toolbar).

Different types of content can be filtered into different tabs, as comments are, for example, on this page. You may also wish to provide separate tabs for content such as Products (if you have Ubercart running), or Events or Projects

Structure

This section of the IA groups together tools used to ‘build’ content for the website which both have and create a User Interface (UI), including:

• Taxonomy
• Content Types
• Blocks
• Forums
• Books
• Feed Aggregator
• CCK (Contrib)
• Panels (Contrib)
• Views (Contrib)
• Webform (Contrib)

Note that this page has not had a ‘visual design’ applied to it yet, the image above is wireframe only.

People

The People landing page uses the same content display and interaction patterns as the Find Content/Content landing page, providing a searchable, sortable and filterable list of ‘people’ on your website. As expected, this includes everyone with administrative privileges and registered users, however we also provide to extract lists of users from nodes and show them in this one location (with contextual links to/from the node of course), including even participants, group members etc.

So, for example, if your site was running a series of events you would be able to click on the ‘events’ tab and see a list of published events and an overview of participants (eg. 46/100 attendees) and communicate with attendees in this location rather than having to to the node to perform this function (as noted above, you will also be able to access this list via the node if you prefer).

Appearance

This page is still a work in progress but would show the currently active theme, other themes available for selection and theme configuration options. Any tasks associated with selecting or managing the theme live in this section. As noted in the ‘Strategies’ post, this is not a common task however it is very important in the evaluation and ‘getting started’ process and requires this primary position for wayfinding and positioning reasons.

Config & Modules

Config & Modules (renamed recently from Modules & Config) is a hard working section of the site that houses the less used (on a day to day basis) functionality of the site, but some of the most critical aspects for site administrators.

The first of the two pages in this section is the Config page. There is a ‘status’ message at the top for module updates but the majority of the site is dedicated to making the site administration tasks easily findable. We have approached this primarily by regrouping and sometimes renaming the individual items or their groups for clarity.

The propose content and grouping of the contents of this page are:

People Settings:

• Roles
• Permissions
• Emails (extracted from admin/settings/user for findability)
• Registration/Deactivation (extracted from admin/settings/user for findability)
• Personalisation (extracted from admin/settings/user for findability)
• Other Settings (because there were still a few odd settings left!)

Media

• Image Toolkit
• Image-Cache (example of contrib module placement in this IA)
• Image Field (example of contrib module placement in this IA)
• Image (example of contrib module placement in this IA)

Site Administration:

• Site Information
• File System Path (currently File System)
• File Upload Restrictions (currently File Uploads)
• IP Blocking

Maintenance

• Maintenance Mode
• Logging & Errors
• Performance
• Backup & Migrate (example of contrib module placement in this IA)
• Update Status (example of contrib module placement in this IA)

Development

• Testing

Search

• Search settings

URLs

• URL Path Settings (currently URL Aliases)
• Clean URLs
• Pathauto (example of contrib module placement in this IA)

RSS

• RSS Publishing

Workflow

• Triggers
• Actions

External Publishing

• Blog API

Internationalisation

• Translate Interface
• Regional Settings
• Languages

This page will also house a ‘launch pad’ to access the interfaces for major modules that do have significant interface requirements, for example Ubercart, Organic Groups, Projects, and Storm (Project Management). For site that use these modules extensively, the toolbar and dashboard will also provide more direct access into the module interface & functionality.

Reports will become accessible from the dashboard interface.

The other page in this section is the modules page:

This page essentially provides access to add new modules to your Drupal site, and to manage/configure your currently installed modules. Grouping them in with the other configuration functionality removes any ambiguity about where to go for configuration tasks, however it is important to maintain the term ‘modules’ in the global navigation as this is a keyword that people will frequently be scanning for. This modules wireframe is fairly new – to discuss this page in detail pls head over to the Modules page in the Project Framework

In addition to all of this there is a Help section, a Profile Page for the user, a Log Out link and the customisable task bar and dashboard that we’ll talk about in more detail elsewhere. But otherwise, that’s about it.

I know from what I’ve seen of (particularly new) users interacting with Drupal this can make a significant positive difference. I hope you feel the same and, as ever, welcome your feedback.