Drupal Admin: It's Not About Us

Abstract:
You can greatly increase client satisfaction by tailoring an administration experience based on their perspectives and needs.

Key Take-Aways:

• The importance of putting yourself in their shoes, you have to forget what you already know (Method Acting)
• Why the ultimate success of a solution can come down to whether or not the content creators like to use it
• Finding the ways in which different people have different workflows for different jobs
• The ways in which administration experiences are only going to become more and more important
• How Drupal can get the admin experience ~90% of the way there in just 2-3 hours of effort
• How you can add most of the work into your companies default Drupal profile to establish a baseline
• Some tips specific to D7 & D8

How many times have you been faced with a client that has an unfair opinion of the Drupal Admin?

Ever had a critical stakeholder request Wordpress over Drupal because "Wordpress just feels more user friendly”?

The Drupal admin offers a level of flexibility and customizability that makes working with most comparable systems feel like swimming in shackles. So why such a bum-rap? Despite how enabled developers are to customize the admin, as the sprints run out, the budget runs low, or a hard deadline approaches; the admin has a tendency to be one of the first things to get sidelined.

The most important step is to put yourself in the shoes of non-Drupal savvy. You must think like the stakeholders that will maintain the system as their job. What content will they frequently edit, when could they benefit from a custom list provided by views, when could one extra filter or column save them hours of work each week. We have the power to help get these folks home on time each evening, and it is in the best interest of the entire Drupal community that we make that a reality.