Site structuring and navigation in Drupal

CMS: Drupal

Friday - 4:15pm - Friday - 5:15pm

Description:

Drupal provides a multitude of tools to help you organise, structure, categorise, and link pages on your site. These tools also provide interface elements that help your users in navigating around. But deciding which of these tools to use can be difficult. Even more difficult is the problem of making them work together in harmony, especially when many of them have fundamentally different design philosophies.

The menu, node, taxonomy, and theming systems (among others) all have flexible architectures and powerful APIs. And yet, it can be quite challening to bring them all together to create a clear, integrated, and consistent user experience.

This session will be an open group discussion that aims to address the following topics:

• What are the visual elements that make up a navigational experience in Drupal?
• What would be the ideal navigational experience for a typical Drupal site?
• What combinations of tools are available to achieve this?
• How can these tools be made to work with each other, and not against each other?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of Drupal's current API / architecture in supporting a good navigational experience?
• What changes could be made to Drupal to support a better navigational experience?

Although this session will present numerous specific Drupal modules, its focus will not be on the modules themselves. Instead, the focus will be on navigation as an enhancer of usability, and on proposing / brainstorming improvements to Drupal core that could enhance usability through better navigation.

Lead by: