The Drupal 7 User Experience

The Bad
I'm sure my comments will be really late in the game but I just updated my local Drupal 7 installation to start converting my themes to D7 and what at first was excitement quickly turned into disappointment. At first glance the modal admin UI was interesting, refreshing even, but then doing simple tasks like creating content became a source of frustration because I had no idea where to find it!

The block admin page is a mess and extremely difficult to use, I actually prefer the D6 block admin. I feel this page should not be a modal, I like being able to see what region is where as I'm assigning content to it. Also I am not seeing where to create a new block, I dunno if I am brain dead or something but I cant find it...?? This is really upsetting to me because the D7 team has supposedly been working really hard to improve the UI. The block admin just totally falls short.

When editing nodes there is a disconnect because some pages open up in a modal and some don't. I find this really frustrating, I personally prefer that these be actual pages. The annoying part about it being a modal is that once you save your changes you have to reload the page to see them, whereas if the node edit form was a page of its own on save you would see your new content. There are also certain pages in the admin that don't have a breadcrumb so when you click through to them you cant just easily go back.

Now I know that this is an optional module, but it seems to be on by default. Turn it off and its so much better! My comments about the block page are still the same with no modal..

The Good
Ok so it's not ALL bad... I did see a lot of improvements that were exciting to me. First I like the block/node edit links that appear when hovering over an item. These are convenient! Especially when you are viewing a listing of node teasers or want to make a simple edit to a block. A+! I think the presentation could maybe be better but thats all on the themer I suppose.

Input filters - I really like the solution here on comment and node add/edit forms. Instead of it being a fieldset (which always bugged the hell out of me!) it is more compact and visually makes sense. I really love the select box option and how the allowed values change upon selection of a filter.

Content types - It really makes sense that the settings for author information/post date and length of teasers options are now set within the content type edit form under display settings. Also its great that you can set a default parent menu item for a content type.

I also really like how just about everything is a region now, this opens up a lot of possibilities and is an excellent feature!

One improvement that I love and would LOVE if it was taken further is the installing new themes/modules functionality! This is excellent! It has been something that I saw in Wordpress and hoped it would come to Drupal. However, its not perfect - in order to add a module or theme, you have to go to the D.O project page and find which release version you want, right click, copy the url and then go back to your Drupal site and paste it in. What I would LOVE here, is to be able to put in the project url (because most people that use Drupal know these off hand), have the UI show you which versions are available for the Drupal version you're running and let you click to install from there.

Those are my first impressions of D7... I'm sure there will be more to come as I use it more and discover new things.