Improve Your Drupal Content Management Experience

Content management for your website should be easy, even if your site is highly complex. Over the years, we have continually improved the backend experience for the Drupal websites we develop. Our goal is to make it easier for administrators at nonprofit organizations to manage existing content and create new content.

We have been focused on three main improvements:

1. Content Administration Views
2. Organization and sequence of information on the Content Edit page
3. Simplifying Administrator controls for design and customization

In this article, we’ll look at the last two all at once, showing you our content edit form. If you want to learn more about the first one you can read a blog post that Brent, our Senior Designer here at BackOffice Thinking, wrote about Content Administration Views in Drupal.

Improved Content Edit Form Layout for Drupal 9 CMS

In our latest project, we have focused on the overall organization and theme of the content edit form. The backend page content is where administrators and editors probably spend the most time. The best way to explain what we have done is to look at the screenshots below.

Here is the out-of-the-box Drupal backend:

As you can see in the image below, this new backend admin theme helps clean up the overall display. It is not only easier on the eyes, but also more intuitive and functional for our clients’ needs.  Let’s walk through the elements that make this form more user friendly (follow along with the purple numbers in the screenshot):

1. Important information and error messages presented clearly at the top of the screen
2. Prominent save and publish buttons
3. Status, updated date and time, and author all immediately visible, no need to scroll down
4. Descriptive messaging to help new admin users understand what they can do on this page type
5. Specific layout options, with clear help notes, that give the admin-user easy control over key elements of page design
6. Collapsible sections to help organize the page fields, with the most important sections expanded by default
7. Secondary content settings like SEO options are kept in a sidebar, with the main body of the page focused on the actual content that will display on the website
8. The Landing Page and Component Framework offers flexibility and design consistency by giving users a “kit-of-parts” that can easily be added to, removed, and rearranged
9. Each individual component has its own buttons to enable editing
10. One-click access for adding new content components to the page

Let’s face it, the out-of-the-box Drupal backend for administrators is not always easy and intuitive to use! But the beauty of Drupal is that with some fairly simple configuration and organization adjustments, it can be a power tool, catered specifically for your unique needs as an administrator of a complex Mission Delivery Platform. When we design and develop new websites for nonprofits, we know that the backend admin user experience matters just as much as the frontend design.

Upgrade Your Drupal Backend
If you have an existing Drupal 9 website, contact us for help implementing some or all of these techniques above.

If you have a Drupal 7 website, consider whether it’s time to make the move to Drupal 9! Check out our blog post titled Drupal 7 Is “Sunsetting” in 2023 to figure out your next steps. If and when you decide to upgrade, we’re here to help – and this improved backend design experience awaits.