Drupal recommendations for custom admin section

Question

Is this a common task in your Drupal job when you are asked to create a custom Drupal administration section for your content?

For example, you have several types of content, and the user wants to not only view them, but also search using different filters, add new elements - all inside the same admin section.

In essence, this is a classic search / grid / screen / record page, and in typical Drupal content distribution management environments are scattered around, I'm talking about a more organized spage, for example. in which the Grid (View) also has a “Add New” link, and you don’t need to scroll through the “Create Content” menu for another section.

What is your experience and opinion in this regard?

Answer 1

I am really working on something like this right now where I work. We created a special module to solve the most complex Drupal problem related to unorganized content by organizing it in a beautiful tree structure. We decided to do this and create a completely new section inside the administrator only for managing content through this module (it contains much more functionality than just a tree structure). When deciding on this, there were two important factors.

• We knew that we were not going to release this module, so we did not need to worry about integration with other modules, because any such integration would be carried out by us.
• The non-technical personnel to whom this was proposed preferred this method, having several different admin pages with different functionalities on each of them, despite all the related functionality. They were considered simply easier to use.

My explanation is based on the following: if this makes sense in your situation, I would say by making either a new section or a new page with several tabs. There are many crucial factors to consider:

• Do I provide (or my) clients, for example, to a Drupal administrator?
• Do I need to worry about integration with third-party modules?
• Is entity time (this big)?
• Are new administration pages expandable to me?
• Is updating to the newest version of Drupal of great importance (from 5 to 6, and then from 6 to 7, etc.)?

Many non-developers I spoke with complained to the Drupal administrator and most of the content editors I talked to or worked with preferred a single administration page that they could go to to manage all their content. As a result, our installation is well received by our customers, although some of them in the Drupal community may not agree with it.

Answer 2

you can use the views_bulk_operation module to display content (or users) to perform (batch) operations on them. this way you get a sortable grid with search capabilities (open filters), pagination and the ability to perform custom group actions. from here it's easy to add a “create new” link in the footer of the view. in addition, you can use the link as "local tasks" to organize tabbed views.

I usually use simplemenu for the admin backend, and I hide the navigation menu in the sidebar for everyone except administrators.

Answer 3

Another option - much easier to deliver - is to create a new menu that is accessible only to administrators - and depending on the displayed content - with links to pages for common tasks. For example, for example, or add new content to the currently displayed type, etc.