The Drupal 6 status update has spawned a very long thread with suggestions on how to improve the usability of Drupal. I figured I'd open up the discussion and let people post their favorite suggestions for usability improvements and aggregate them in a new thread. (Crazy strategy, I know.)

Personally, I'm mostly interested in the kind of suggestions that can still make it into Drupal 6 with the help of an aspiring developer. Many of our expert developers are already super-busy working on other improvements so let's try to come up with "simple" improvements that might inspire new developers to get their hands dirty and contribute to core.

So let's focus on smaller improvements rather than legendary tasks such as improved image handling or a full-blown WYSIWYG editor. Yes, we've heard you but it might not be the best strategy to focus on these big tasks now. Let's involve more people, and coach them to become experts that can help take on bigger tasks in future. And at the same time, let's aim to get some additional usability improvements into Drupal 6. (That doesn't imply that the bigger improvements can't make it into Drupal 6.)

And me? I'll promise to review and test your patches!

Here are some of my own suggestions that fall in the "small and simple" category. Hopefully it sets the right tone for this thread, and hopefully it avoids the obvious WYSIWYG comments ...

1. Streamlined installation procedure. Remove the Drupal welcome page, and replace it by additional installation steps in the installer. The additional installation steps should query the user for basic site settings (i.e. site name, site slogan), and should provide a dedicated and simpler user interface to create the administrative user account (i.e. user #1).
2. Quick start install profile. I'd also like to ship core with an optional install profile optimized at jump starting your installation -- for example, one that sets up a working contact form and creates a dummy about page with a clean and human-readable URL.
3. Hierarchical page structuring. Remove the "book page" node type, and turn the book module into a module that is specialized at creating hierarchical content trees. This module will be the de facto standard to structure pages and to create hierarchical navigation schemes in Drupal.
4. "Save as draft" feature. Better support for saving posts as draft. Ideal for the Drupal-bloggers amongst us.
5. Module update notifications. Let Drupal tell me when a new version of a module became available. Oh, wait, dww is working on that already, but he could use some help to get it implemented in time for Drupal 6!
6. Improve path alias administration. Add a search form to the path alias administration screen. On a site with hundreds or thousands of path aliases, it becomes impossible to find the path alias that you want to edit.
7. Remember anonymous comment posters. When someone leaves a comment as an anonymous user, his name, e-mail address and URL are not remembered. If we'd store that information in the user's session, he or she wouldn't have to re-enter that information every single time. A subtle but important improvement.
8. Backup module. How hard would it be to make a simple backup module, and how many people would be helped by it? It could be really simple but highly effective.
9. All small bits that help flatten the Drupal learning curve.

Any small annoyances left? Any subtle but important improvements that can be implemented for Drupal 6? Let's tackle some.