fixing clutter with theme
Groups:
I have seen several posts that complain about the clutter in DC out of the box. I agree that no user would really want to browse content by content type. The recent group content list on the group homepage and dashboard puts it all out there, so why have tabs for discussion, blogs, polls, wikis, and documents (or other custom content types like Embedded Media Fields)? I do see some usefullness in having a seprate tab for events (and other date based custom content types created by other contrib modules). Is that clean-up best handled in the theme? Seems logical to include it in the out-of-the box theme, then different communities could ditch those tabs in the theme and clean things up alot for end users.
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Would you migrate your Commons site to Drupal 7
Yes: definitely it is important
76%
Maybe: would evaluate
20%
No: it is not very imporant
4%
Total votes: 292
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Comments
If the content types are used
If the content types are used for different purposes, isn't it necessary to have the tabs? Recent group content may not have content for all the types. What would you replace the tabs with? Wouldn't having a separate space for each content type (rather than tabs) be more cluttered? I can't see a way of not having the tabs.
Making them easy to turn on and off from within Commons could be a nice idea, but I personally think an out-of-the-box version should have all options enabled, so people can turn them off (rather than the other way round).
In my opinion, clutter is not the problem, but the way the pages are laid out / style (which is begin discussed in-depth in this group).
I'm thinking Wall
I guess it depends on the application. For my purposes, I am thinking about the facebook wall. One place to go (almost) to post different types of content. There, it does not matter if you post a microblog, photo, video, or share a link. You can't go to a tab to see all the links your friends have shared and I suppose no one would want to. Maybe it could just be filteres on the recent items, so people could use that method to browse different content types. I agree it all needs to be there out-of-the-box, because different sites will use different parts in different ways. To me, it points to a need to show how things like that can be addressed through theming.
Fair point, and I am also
Fair point, and I am also keen on using Facebook as a good example of usability. The part of it you mention sounds more like the Shoutbox / Facebook-style Statuses modules. Also I agree and have already posted that I thought the difference between Discussions, Blogs, Documents, Wikis could be confusing for some users. But a user in that thread gave a very good example of how he was using these for different things.
I wonder if this is about theming though? When I first started using Commons I was confused with the Group tabs - where to edit them. Someone recommended the Tab Tamer module, which seems to work (although haven't actually tried using it properly yet).
Clutter
According to Jared Spool, evidence shows that clutter is not a problem if users can find what they are looking for. I am all for surfacing as much content as possible as long as the links are clear and unambiguous. Tabs are problematic when the nomenclature is too vague ("documents").
Hi dmoorevtedu, It sounds
Hi dmoorevtedu,
It sounds like most of the clutter you are wanting to remove/change is related to the content within the panels layouts and block configurations, which is not directly related to the theme. You can easily changes these things through the Drupal admin without having to edit the theme. I would recommend reading through the Panels documentation, or just experimenting, to learn how Panels works for layouts and content delivery http://drupal.org/node/496278
Hope that helps,
Sheena
I can't for the life of me
I can't for the life of me figure out where the tabs are on the group homepage panel. Where do the tabs at that level live? they are mostly a bunch of viewes. I don't get it. I tried editing the panel, but I din't see where they are!
Those tabs are added by each
Those tabs are added by each View which creates one of the pages. For example, if you click on the "documents" tab, then hover over the view and click the view's "edit" link that will appear when you hover, you will be taken to that View's configuration page. at the bottom on the left part of the Views configrations, you'll see the Menu settings for that Views page. Click on this and you'll be able to disable the tab, move it to a menu, remove it or change the name.
Here is a screenshot to show what those settings look like: https://skitch.com/sheenad/r2n2t/edit-view-og-tab-documents-drupal-commons
Hope that helps!
This is definitely a debatable point
I see the value of both the "Wall" style approach as well as the current tabs of content.
To be clear, users of Jive Software (which has a large market presence) are happy with the content-type-per-tab layout. So there's data that suggests people want this.
However, I think the real point here is that we have lots of navigational waypoints: tabs of content type, "Recent Content" blocks, and "Recent Activity" blocks. These all contain similar, but slightly different information. I think the notion that we want to rationalize all these (over time) is valid. Exactly what we rationalize them to is open for discussion.