In other words: while working on a project, keep in mind the actual Drupal admin user, as well! Don't focus exclusively on building the end user's experience! Creating a great Drupal admin user experience for your client's IT staff is equally crucial, you know.
For you can't just hand over the Drupal project to your client along with a long list of instructions for his/her site administrators to work it out... somehow, thinking that:
“These are trained folks, they'd just... learn to work with it”.
Instead:
Do invest the same resources to meticulously plan and to build the user experience of all those admin users who'll be working with this newly delivered Drupal website on a daily basis actually: creating, approving, editing, publishing content...
They'll be the ones who, along with the end users, will be interacting the most with your work, after all!
Consider turning the administrative UX into:
- a conveniently simplified workflow: strip it down to the essential steps
- a time-saving (think keyboard shortcuts!)
- ideally intuitive
- productivity boosting
… experience.
In short: trigger and leverage Coffee Module's super features!
1. Coffee... What?
I bet you already guess where its name comes from:
As coffee's our daily energy booster (at least I know I turn into a zombie without my daily dose of it), so is the Coffee Module admins' productivity booster!
How? By enhancing their administrative experience with a Mac-Like live search experience!
Basically, using some “winning” key combos, the Drupal admin user gets:
- instant access to the Drupal admin system
- easy access to navigate across the entire infrastructure of pages and options in the Drupal menu
He/she will no longer need to keep on clicking to get to a specific page on the Drupal website. Instead, the whole Drupal admin user experience gets upgraded:
The keyboard shortcuts trigger a search bar enabling a live search. Just like in the screenshot here below:
2. How to Exploit Its Features? Boosting the Admin's Search Experience
Obviously, the very first step to take, in order to gain access to and leverage the module's features is to: install it!
Enable it and... you are/your Drupal admin user's good to go!
Next, for triggering that modal input field, just use:
- the Alt+D key combo on Mac
- Alt+CTRL+D key combo on Windows IE
Now let's assume that your Drupal administrator or content manager needs to gain instant access to the Appearance page. All he'll/she'll need to do is:
Enter “ap” in that search bar and the full path will get automatically displayed.
Also, what if the content editor would need to add contents to a particular content type on the given Drupal website? Then he'd just:
Enter an “add” command in that coffee modal input field there.
And that's it!
Just imagine how many seconds your site's admin user would just “shave off” on a day-to-day basis by triggering this search bar and entering the due commands there!
That instead of sifting through lots of pages and lots of options, just to complete one of his administrative tasks!
3. The Coffee Module in Drupal 8
Is building a great Drupal administrative experience even easier since the Drupal 8 version of Coffee?
Yes! The “Go to” Drupal menu item got added: just click on it and you gain instant access to the Drupal 8 module's super features.
4. It Does Have Limitations in Enhancing the Drupal Admin User Experience
Coffee is far from perfect, no doubt about it. For instance, it won't delve deeper than the first couple of layers.
So, it won't enable your Drupal admin users to quickly track down the settings of an individual contact form, for instance.
Even so, its benefits are more than obvious and luring:
- it does dig everywhere within the first levels and still helps any admin to save lots of valuable time while on a site building or development mode
- it gives them the freedom to define their own custom coffee commands; the module does flex to their search needs
5. Wrap Up: Boost Your Admin Users' Productivity with... Coffee
Consider installing the Coffee module when building the admin UX on your current or the next Drupal project that you'll be working on.
You'll manage to “wow” your client by improving the whole Drupal admin user experience for his/her IT staff:
- they'll be saving valuable time to invest in actual quality work instead
- they'll be boosting their productivity