[wp-hackers] Idea: Drag-and-Drop WordPress Admin Design (with a functional example)

[Jeremy Clarke]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Kaspars Dambis
<kaspars at konstruktors.com> wrote:
>
> There are many reasons for that -- mainly the scrolling and the extra
> clicks for expanding and collapsing the menu items before actually
> getting to the necessary link, when compared to a drop-down menu.
>

I think it's useful to remember that in this case 'clicks' means
radically different things depending on whether you're talking about a
page-reload click and a menu-opening click. The problem with the
current/old menu system is not really that 'manage > categories' takes
too many clicks, but that pages in the wp admin aren't particularly
fast to load, especially if you have a slow server or connection. AJAX
stuff in general has a complicating effect on clicks as a measure of
utility because most of the time you can load a lot of extra
functionality into a page with very little weight added to the actual
page when you first load it. I think that's what's happening in this
case. It really is faster to click a menu title then a submenu as long
as it means only ever loading one more page to get exactly where you
want to go.

On my own site I've always used a dropdown menu plugin to get around
the extra pageloads for menu items, but I've never felt that the
dropdown menu plugins were easy enough to use for large sites with
lots of users. This new system seems like it will satisfy both needs,
fast loading and obvious function.

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 7:13 PM, Ryan Boren <ryan at boren.nu> wrote:
>
> The gist I got was that the left-hand nav tested much better than the
> top nav.  Left-hand nav brings more info above the fold, which was one
> of the main complaints with 2.5 -- if not the main complaint.  With
> the nav moved to the left and less stuff up top, you have less
> vertical scrolling to do in areas where it really matters, such as the
> edit forms.  For my usage, 2.7 has eliminated all vertical scrolling.
> Of course, I don't install a bunch of plugins that add menus (cursed
> things), open all menus at once, and go rooting around in the plugin
> menus. :-)
>

It's also worth remembering that in a lot of cases most users of a
site aren't admins. For non-admin users this new menu system will put
everything they have access to in the sidebar and they can probably
leave them all open all the time.

-- 
Jeremy Clarke | http://simianuprising.com
Code and Design | http://globalvoicesonline.org