Getting Drupal’s Access Control Module to Work Properly

After set­ting up some con­tent types — some pub­lic, some inter­nal. I installed the Access Con­trol mod­ule, set up inter­nal con­tent not to be vis­i­ble to anony­mous users — but with­out any effect.

After some research, but with­out suc­cess, I real­ized the *Advanced* sec­tion at the bot­tom of the Access Con­trol tab for each con­tent type. And now the magic trick: Increase the weight and you are done. So I guess the build in access man­age­ment was fight­ing the Access Con­trol mod­ule, so it is up to you to make your favorite mod­ule stronger by giv­ing it more weight. — I doubt this is intu­itive. Addi­tion­ally, it is for sure dif­fi­cult to sim­ply find the tiny lit­tle select box down there in a sec­tion, which is by default folded.

KDE vs. Gnome

Now, my deci­sion is final: KDE rules (though I actu­ally pre­fer the look of Gnome ).

Sim­ple rea­son: Gnome does not sup­port drag-and-drop in com­bi­na­tion with alt+tab (see bug tracker), but there might be hope with the upcom­ing Gnome 3.

[Edit 2011-06-14: Indeed, drag-and-drop + alt-tab works since since Ubuntu 11.04 (did not try with 10.10). One major dif­fer­ence remains: Do you need a lot of con­fig­u­ra­tion and cus­tomiza­tion options? And are you will to accept com­plex, maybe not that self-explaining menu struc­tures for that? If yes, KDE is your choice, oth­er­wise Gnome might make your life eas­ier. See also this page for more details and screenshots.]

In more detail: using drag-and-drop together with alt+tab key com­bi­na­tion allows to work very effi­ciently. For exam­ple, while order­ing my pho­tos, I want to work on one of them — as I do this reg­u­larly, Gimp is opened already, but in the back­ground — so what I do using KDE or MS Win­dows is, I grab the pic­ture, switch to Gimp by using alt+tab and imme­di­ately drop the pic­ture with­out mov­ing the mouse at all — I am quite con­fi­dent that this is the fastest way of open­ing a pic­ture for edit­ing. Some peo­ple advice to set Gimp as default appli­ca­tion to open JPEGs, but I am not always edit­ing pic­tures, most of the times I just want to view them.

Using “Open With” on a JPEG file for sure is the com­mon approach — but let’s com­pare it:

• Drag-and-drop & alt+tab
  • Actions to be per­formed: mouse down + key down + key up + mouse up
  • In total: four fast steps
• “Open With” solu­tion (hold­ing mouse down as improvement)
  • Actions to be performed:mouse down + mov­ing to “Open With” + wait for sub-menu to open + move to sub-menu + mouse up
  • In total: two fast, three slow steps

How to Make Jquerymenu for Drupal Keep its State on Page Reload

While set­ting up the web­site for my new project “Glo­cal” www.glocal-project.eu), I came across the prob­lem of find­ing a proper menu mod­ule. Some­thing easy to use, sta­ble and effi­cient in the same time for the com­plex intranet struc­ture (there­fore, sorry, but you will not be able to see my solu­tion there unless you are a project mem­ber). Some­thing with a high usabil­ity in the end. Active­menu is still quite buggy and DHTML Menue requires a dou­ble click to actu­ally open a page — unbear­able in a non-doulbe-click envi­ron­ment like the Inter­net — who is sup­posed to guess, that this menu requires a dou­ble click?? Leav­ing me with JQuery­menu.

First impres­sion: per­fect! Open and close branches by click­ing (+) or (-) — view page by click­ing menu item label. Even the few styling issues could be fixed eas­ily by using CSS. But as soon, as some­one clicks a label, the menu col­lapses to its default sta­tus. It does not remem­ber its last sta­tus after load­ing a dif­fer­ent page with the same menu.

Is this it? All mod­ule have crit­i­cal down­sides like this? I was quite dis­ap­pointed!

But I taught JQuery­menu to remember!

As it is quite some code, I will not post it here directly, but added it to the tracker page for this “fea­ture request” or you can down­load the two updated files (jquerymenu.js and jquerymenu.module) here and replace the once in your /sites/all/modules/jquerymenu folder.

But please be care­ful, it should be con­sid­ered an alpha ver­sion, there are quite some weak­nesses (see tracker page). Any feed­back or sug­ges­tions are very wel­come!

good & bad usablity
the tap example

Every­one inter­ested in HCI and Usabil­ity saw the cover pic­ture of The Design of Every­day Things by Don­ald Nor­man. But there are exam­ples about good and bad usabil­ity all around us, every day and I want to share one of mine.

I real­ized how much more com­fort­able the shower tap at my par­ents place is, com­pared to the one in my shared flat.

Don’t move! If you touch it and you are lucky, the water gets only turned off… oth­er­wise you get frozen or boiled.

A good exam­ple of a water-tap for a shower.

The exam­ple to the left  is a typ­i­cal one — most prob­a­bly fol­low­ing an assump­tion like “this tap is work­ing for the wash­bowl, so it will do for a shower as well”. As it is mounted waist-high, it is easy to reach, also by mis­take, which can be quite dan­ger­ous as it can eas­ily be turned towards hot water by a slight touch. The re-engineered exam­ple on the right shows a func­tional and easy-to-use solu­tion, in addi­tion, the water tem­per­a­ture can be set up very pre­cisely, but most impor­tant, there is no way to change the water tem­per­a­ture by acci­dent as it is selected with a knob. Addi­tion­ally, due to the knob, its almost impos­si­ble to reach the han­dle, which is used to set up the water amount, by accident.