Feature Proposal: Redesign AdminToolsCategory

Motivation

AdminToolsCategory is so unhelpful it might as well be thrown away. Or it needs a better structure and design. Let's try the latter first.

Description and Documentation

• The webs table can be very long so should be in a twisty just like the recent ManagingWebs redesign and should in fact just include that same list
• The link labels are too terse and need some context
  • For instance, why is there a link to InterWikis in between the site tools line?
  • The topic summary at "All Admin Tools Category topics" is autogenerated and should instead be human edited text. It should also be grouped.
• Overall this should be a dashboard, giving a quick glance at the current state
• No help or info for beginning admins is given
• Question: what actions should be done from this page?
  • Often the wiki master is the admin. Is that clear enough?
  • I can imagine macro programming as well, for instance DebugPreferenceSettings
  • Common admin problems? "Questions you hoped they would never ask"

Observations:

• A link to ManagingUsers is missing
• Plugins: these are in fact "installed plugins"
  • No word on contribs
  • Nothing about finding and downloading more extensions

Examples

Impact

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

-- Contributors: ArthurClemens - 02 Sep 2009

Discussion

I agree that is almost useless as it is.

Making use of twisties is a good idea. It also needs more text, rather than just lists and tables. What is all this information showing, and how is it useful? Maybe some FAQ's, links to Foswiki.org support web.

Also, why is it called AdminToolsCategory and not simply AdminTools? Perhaps it could be an AdminDashboard?

Its good to see some improvements being made to the System topics.

-- AndrewJones - 02 Sep 2009

It might be pertinent that I've set topic parents for most of the distributed topics, and its possible that we could use those as a simplistic replacement for the categories.

Also, I made a demo of a possible AdminDashboard in FoswikiApplicationsContrib - its been broken by an update to FormsPlugin, but should be a piece of cake to make work again.

-- SvenDowideit - 19 Sep 2009

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