Suggestions for Improving Drupal’s Book Module – Part 1: Administration

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Note: a wiki containing this article and many other more in-depth discussions of drupal usability is HERE

A while back I promised to write up some suggestions for improving the book module. I finally got some time, so here they are. I’m posting this here because as far as I know, the drupal.org forums don’t yet allow images to be posted.

I am mostly interested in improving the navigation for the end user of drupal-based books, but I will start with my suggestions for changing the administration of books. Navigation suggestions will follow in another post.

1. When you browse to any page of a book, and click “administer,” you go to the editing screen for that one page.

At the very bottom of the editing screen, there is a button “Edit book outline” that allows you to administer the relationship of that one page to the outline of the rest of the book.
takes you to:

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The Problem with Slashdot and other web archives

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Something that’s been kicking around in my head for a while, is the fact that I find most large web archives and blogs frustrating to various degrees. Including my own site!

The frustration has to do with what I would call, the “opacity” of sites to browsing, to discovery of information you do not know is there, and could not find because you aren’t searching for it directly. There are times I am in search of “information inspiration”- the serendipitous discovery of what I really wanted to know but didn’t know it.

Of course many sites have great search engines, and categorize articles by topic. But I feel that doesn’t go far enough. There are times when I am not even aware of the right WORD to describe a concept, but could recognize articles associated with it if I scanned them for a second or two. Or I am aware of the right word, but want some way to find ideas related to it serendipitously. This is what I call information inspiration.

Slashdot (and many other news sites and blogs) are date oriented. What happens to the articles after their moment in the sun, though is that they become increasingly buried. If you browse by topic, you still are unlikely to see them, since there are so many under each topic. Slashdot’s design discourages searching for topics.

First I have to say: don’t get me wrong. This is not meant as a critique of Slashdot per se: I LOVE Slashdot. I read it every day, and have for years. However, I feel like something is missing in general from our arsenal of navigation techniques on the web, so I am using Slashdot as an example here.

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A Browser Sniffer/Screen Resolution Sniffer that swaps stylesheets

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This is based on two javascripts, combined. This script contains a browser sniffer that will test for Mac or PC, and will also test if the PC is 800×600 or a higher resolution. I figure most macs are set to a decent resolution, but have found much to my dismay that many PC’s here are still set to 1997 standards.

This will swap style sheets depending on what is “sniffed”.

I’ve included the locations for the original scripts, which contain other options you may wish to include.

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Alphabetical Title Browser for Drupal

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Note: See also PHP Alternating Color Table Rows for Drupal or Dreamweaver sites

I needed an alphabetical browser of all published nodes, and couldn’t figure out how to do it using existing Drupal tools, so created one in Dreamweaver and made a static page out of it. Maybe someone can make a Drupal module out of? it. It needs at least four big improvements that I can think of –

1. The Dreamweaver connection code needs to be Drupal-ized
2. It is written in the backwards Dreamweaver way – the php gets inserted into the html, rather than having the php output the html as part of the stream of code.
3. It needs to have the alternating table rows
4. It needs to be paged, when the list gets too long.

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