The Next Step

The newest version of WordPress has made updating ridiculously easy. When you sign in and there are updates available, you see a link that says “Click here to update.” This makes it incredibly attractive for projects where you’re working with people who have little to no technical skills.

I appreciate this more now since I just had my first experience with updating Drupal. While I was fairly impressed with the simplicity of the initial installation for Drupal, updating was clearly neglected (although at least someone seems to have their eye on this). Updating, especially between minor security revisions, really should be easier. In most situations that I’ve worked in, a CMS is supposed to let users manage the web site without giving them the ability to damage the web site to much. Making updating difficult is one of the most dangerous things you can do since people just won’t do it if they don’t know how.

I’ve been asked to investigate Drupal as a possible CMS offering to diversify BigBad’s portfolio of CMS offerings. I thought, while I’m at it, I can share some tips and tricks I discover along the way. One of the first problems I ran into when I started making my custom Drupal theme was that the editing interfaces looked really bad in it. Like, unusable bad. Things like deleting nodes or viewing their outlines, editing users, or even logging in were difficult or impossible. So I set out to try to find a way to make all admin and editor interfaces use the administration theme, and found my solution in the Administration Theme module. This module adds more options to your Site Configuration > Administration Theme that let you specify that batch processing and Devel pages should show in the admin theme, and also gives you free license to enter Drupal paths for any other pages you want to use the admin theme, complete with a wildcard character.

Here’s what I put in my Custom Pages:

node/*/delete
node/*/outline
user/*/edit
user
users/*

I’ll probably end up with more entries in there as I run into more snags, but this seems to be working pretty well for me so far.