A few people have asked me to share the UX-team list of issues around the content author experience. This list has been accumulated over the years, by testing the content creation screen in almost every usability study since 2008.
In general people expect a much richer user experience around content creation than Drupal offers, much of the functionality that people consider standard for a CMS is simply missing.
Most of these issues have relatively clear UX solutions, but lack the technical resources to actually happen. We found that this is one of those areas in core that although important, is not something that a lot of core contributors are excited to work on. This might change however if we are able to make a few large steps in this experience.
- Previewing is a big part of creating content, and people are currently very confused by preview being shown in the back-end instead of front-end.
- The meta tools we present users; menu, revisioning, authoring information are cumbersome and often result to conflicting mental models.
- Text formats are still somewhat of a mystery to most of our users, they miss a WYSIWYG editor.
- The lack of a common workflows like save as draft is a disappointment.
- Tools for moderating content are almost non existent, our filters are hard to use and search is non existent.
All the issues below are ranked by priority.
Major issues
- #1510532: Implement the new create content page design
- #1510544: Actual preview of content
- #542290: Make it easier to create draft revisions in core
- #1279652: Add search feature on the node listing admin page
- #1164780: Users miss the "Provide a menu link" checkbox on node/add
- #1123662: Participants did not know how to get the path while creating a menu link
- Autosave