Drupal 8: Improvements to the UI

usefull modules for better UX

Modules for admins

An important - and often overlooked - part of the development of CMS-based systems is the administrative back-end. The ease with which users can update - for example - their site is important. It should not be difficult! I found some usefull modules that take away some of the hinderances.

  • Form Tips

    It can - on the one hand - be very usefull to write some further explaination on fields and forms, so people know what it is for or what to fill in or in what format but - on the other hand - these long texts are very distracting. Form tips hides the texts in a little hover-link, so it is only shown if one wants to read it. Excellent!

  • Automatic entity labels

    It can be very usefull to automatically generate titles for - specifically intermediate - entities so i.e. paths are more consistent. Also admins have one less field to fill!. Tokens can be used, so any contextual circumstance can be used in the title.

  • Hide Revision Field

    Revisions a great. However often a date is enough for a label, we only need the last or previous revision. If revisions are created automatically and dates are sufficient, we can hide the revision field. Again one less!

  • Ajax loader

    Although only a tiny improvement, it can still make a difference in the user-experience. You can display a customised loader (matching a companies logo for example).

  • Dropzonejs

    It used to be really anoying if you wanted to upload series of images. You had to upload them one by one. This is no longer the case. It is now possible by default to upload multiple images in one go. However the proces still requires you to click a button, select a folder, select the images and then click upload. Dropzone adds the option to just drag images from your open directory onto the form and they will be uploaded all at once. Timesaver!