Admin Modules in Drupal Part 1

It's a well known fact that currently Drupal 6's admin interface (while a big step up from Drupal 5) is weak. It's not very aesthetically pleasing, it's not very easy to use, and it's not very powerful. Things are looking up for a few reasons though, namely that for Drupal 7, they are making the user interface one of the main focus points (see http://www.d7ux.org/ for more info).  While Drupal 7 is still a little ways off, there are several modules out there that can help a lot for making the administrator and content provider's jobs a lot easier.

Administration Menu (http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu)

The admin_menu project is an old standby that gives you access to all the menu entries in the backend with one click, via a hovering dropdown menu. It's not all that user friendly (especially if you have lots of modules installed and therefore lots of menu entries) but it's pretty good for power users since you can easily get to any admin page on the site. It doesn't change the actual admin pages at all though.

Unfortunately however, the latest unstable versions (6.x-3.0-alpha3) have introduced some issues that can mess up your menu (and not even reverting to an older version fixes it sometimes) so stay away from that. We haven't had too many problems with alpha 1 though.

Admin (http://drupal.org/project/admin)

The Admin module is a newer module that has already gone through a bunch of changes. It was the admin theme for Open Atrium. It changes everything for an admin, by changing how every page is layed out, and adding a new menu.

I wasn't a huge fan of the 1.x family of releases because it took too many clicks to get where you wanted to go, and it was fairly invasive (it could sometimes causes issues with other modules, because it actually moves some core menu entries elsewhere). The 2.x branch though seems really nice though. It doesn't come with an admin theme of it's own anymore, but lets you use your own (or you can download the theme designed for it, which is the relative of the one in the 1.x branch). It also has a dynamic menu/toolbar like the admin_menu module, but  a bit nicer. It takes more clicks, but it can be put on the top, bottom, or sides of a site, and it is hidden until you click it and it expands. The feature I like the most about the toolbar, is that is extensible, so modules can add their own panels to the toolbar. Out of the box, it comes with devel (http://drupal.org/project/devel) integration which is very nice and lets you easily swithc users, execute php or access any of devel's other functions like emptying the cache. This is a nicer module for users to use I think than admin_menu, but since it requires more clicks, it might slow power users down.

Views Bulk Operations (http://drupal.org/project/views_bulk_operations)

Out of the box, Drupal's administration interfaces for users, content and comments only allow you to do the very basics in a bulk manner (like bulk publishing or unpublishing nodes). This is where VBO comes in. It basically lets you replace those admin interfaces with extensible Views. This lets you add in any kind of extra fields to the display you want, any sorting you want, or any flters you want - if Views can do it, you can add it on. It then lets you run Actions on any of the nodes you select from the View. Actions allow you to manipulate the content of the nodes through the interface. You can do anything the original interface could do, as well as add/remove taxonomy terms, run Rules, modify node fields or anything else an action has been created for. This is one of the most useful modules for administrators there is.

In part 2 of this, I'll go into some modules for letting non-cyborgs manage things like blocks and views.