Drupal Admin Dashboard - Mockup

This is a mockup of Wordpress-liked dashboard for Drupal. As mentioned earlier, I plan to submit this module for Google Summer of Code 2008.

The purpose of this module is to create an one-stop page that give site overview and quick handy links for Drupal site administrator.

My first draft has 5 panels:

Site Status

The most important thing that Drupal administer wants to know is his site is running fine (or has some identifiable problems). So the top panel is site status. To be more eye-catching, I use both icon and color to indicate site health status.

I can think of 8 health states:

1. Online, running perfectly fine
2. Online, has some problems (e.g. Cron doesn't run)
3. Online, has some updates
4. Online, has some security updates
5. Offline, no problem
6. Offline, has some problems
7. Offline, has some updates
8. Offline, has some security updates

Explanation for other links

• "version info" link will take us to "Available updates" (admin/reports/updates) screen
• "See problems" link will take us to "Status report" (admin/reports/status) screen
• There is "Go offline" link (admin/settings/site-maintenance) for handy link

To be done

• How to assign color and icon for all 8 states? (need to be distinctive between each states)
• Can we combine some states to reduce total number?

Recent Activities

This panel is about what currently happens to the site. I initially put 4 types of things I want to see most:

• Latest content
• Latest comments
• Latest users
• Latest tags

The problem is this list is subjective. In case of personal weblog site like this, there is no need to see "Latest users" because there is always only one user. Some people may not allow comment or enable tagging on their site. Then I add "View Options" drop down menu for this job.

To be done

• What else do people want to see?
• Generalize vs specific problem
  • "Content" can be separated by "Content types" e.g. blog, story, forum
  • "Comment" can be separated to "Published" and "Moderated"
  • "Tags" can be separated by "Vocaburary"
• How many items should be on the list? 3, 5 or 10?

Statistics

I always want to know somethings like "Who is the top contributor?", "How many registered users now?" or "What is the most popular comment?". Statistics panel will be my best companion for this job.

I borrow graph idea from Google Analytics but can I make it in time? It seems to be non-trivial task.

This panel shares the "View Options" approach with the "Recent Activities" panel.

To be done

Same question, what else do people want to see?

My list:

• Top users by content contribution
• Top users by comment contribution
• Most popular contents by comment count
• Most popular contents by views
• Most popular tags
• Most popular polls by vote count
• Total contents
• Total comments
• Total users
• Total tags
• Top referrer sites/links

Admin Shortcut

Quick links to most frequent administrative tasks for handy purpose. Items in this panel should not be duplicate with the links in "Recent Activities" panel.

To be done

Where should I place this panel? If I place it on the bottom of page like this (and user need to scroll down), is it still handy?

Drupal News

The purpose of this panel is to enhance relationship between Drupal administer and Drupal project. Drupal movement is shown in recent Drupal.org feed (borrow from WordPress).

I also add links to grab more themes, modules and langpacks from Drupal.org for handy purpose and to make them more visible to Drupal newcomer.

I still can not decide where the last link "Trouble? Need some help?" should take. Either Drupal bundle help page or Drupal.org support page.

Final thought

In summary, this is just first draft and needs a lot more iterations and refinements. Feel free to comment.

P.S. I also need a good name for this project. Both "Dashboard" and "Panel" are taken already.