Adam Gregory

One of Drupal longtime woes has been it’s GUI. It has confused, frustrated, and made more then a few people give up on what is a great platform. Wordpress has had a great Admin interface for a few versions now and Drupal has finally caught up. Drupal 7’s new Administration makes using the system easier and more intuitive for new users and quicker and more efficient for experienced hands.   The new admin interface is a three-part work, the admin toolbar, the overlay module, and the admin theme. Let’s take a look at each of those elements.  

1. The Admin Toolbar.

Drupal has had various contributed modules that have provided this feature for a while, but it’s never been included and enabled by Core. With the new toolbar users have an obvious way to manage their site that wasn’t present in previous versions.  

2. The Overlay Module.

In my opinion this is the single most important feature of Drupal 7 that will make it a success. With the overlay module users are not required to leave the pages they are on to make administrative changes as they once were. No longer do you have to leave the page you’re working on make some configuration changes then try to get back to the page. The overlay module automatically opens all admin pages in a lightbox over the page you are working on. After you make your changes and close the overlay the page you are on automatically refreshes to show those changes.   No other content management system to my knowledge has a feature built into it like this. This will literally put Drupal light years ahead of it’s “competition” in terms of ease of use.  

3. Admin themes.

Drupal has once again had this feature for a while, even in core, but there’s never been the resources put into developing it like there was for Drupal 7. We hired designers, and UIX experts, relied on community feedback, and completely redid the admin backend and theme then turned the admin theme on by default to make it a more user-friendly experience. There has also been the development of a dashboard for the admin theme that adds yet another tool to the Administration of your site.   Drupal 7 makes managing and administering you Drupal site easier then ever.