[meta] Module & Theme UX

Created on 21 October 2011, almost 14 years ago
Updated 7 August 2025, 9 days ago

The user experience of projects has improved significantly in D7 with the introduction of update manager. However we failed to fully integrate it in terms of the opportunities it brought.

For Drupal 8 the focus is on closing the gaps between finding, installing and updating projects.

Installation

Currently we require the user to go onto d.o and search for the correct project, for many of our users this feels like finding a needle in a hay stack. For Drupal 8 we want to make the final step in making project installation truly easier by introducing a "market" like functionality that users have come to expect.

  1. http://drupal.org/project/project_browser
  2. #1243332: Deploy Project Browser Server and drupalorg_pbs on d.o
  3. Tab or promotional area for "Suggested" or "Recommended" modules Active
  4. #538904: D8UX: Redesign Modules Page

In addition to a more awesome project search model. We would like to fine tune the current installation process, while improvements to the module screen could make a immense impact - we would like to make the experience even better through the market.

  1. #1254128: Unify update pages
  2. Enable projects in the installation process
  3. Install dependencies when they are required
  4. Show database updates
  5. Allow for backup of website

Updating

The process for updating your projects has improved significantly in Drupal 7. But we do not clearly communicate this functionality. The outstanding issues for this are therefor almost only design ones.

  1. #1254128: Unify update pages
  2. Simplify security warnings
  3. #964568: Too many ways to reach the available updates report leads to confusion
  4. #606592: Allow updating core with the update manager

Battle plan

All the issues are prioritized by the UX-team its view on how it impacts the overall UX. Given that the list above is quite a lot, we hope to tackle one topic at a time, but also keeping progress on technical hurdles that we need to overcome.

We are looking for feedback on the technical strategy to get this moving and keep it moving, feel free to add new issues and/or structure how to tackle this.

📌 Task
Status

Postponed: needs info

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

extension system

Created by

🇳🇱Netherlands Bojhan

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  • 🇺🇸United States smustgrave

    Thank you for creating this issue to improve Drupal.

    We are working to decide if this task is still relevant to a currently supported version of Drupal. There hasn't been any discussion here for over 8 years which suggests that this has either been implemented or is no longer relevant. Your thoughts on this will allow a decision to be made.

    Since we need more information to move forward with this issue, the status is now Postponed (maintainer needs more info). If we don't receive additional information to help with the issue, it may be closed after three months.

    Thanks!

  • 🇺🇸United States nicxvan

    Yeah I wonder if project browser covers this, it's mentioned in the IS, but I'm not seeing the actual change proposed.

    Let's give @bojhan a chance to reply before closing it.

  • 🇺🇸United States dww

    Bojhan was recently removed as a UX maintainer for core. See 📌 Remove Bojhan as maintainer for Usability topic Active

    Although this is classified as "extension system", it's really tightly coupled to "update.module", of which I am still an active subsystem maintainer. 😅

    I believe it's safe to close this. Most of the stuff he's talking about improving has been removed from update.module. It's no longer called an "Update manager". It's being replaced by both project_browser, the new "update_manager" (what everyone still calls "auto_updates"), and for the non-UI among us, by the fact that Drupal requires using composer now, which simplifies (and complicates) a lot of this UX for us.

    If

  • 🇺🇸United States dww

    I should add: all the energy around Drupal CMS as the primary "product" that folks start from, which now includes both project_browser and (new) update_manager, means anyone starting out with Drupal now will have a much better experience in this realm "out of the box". So the existence of drupal_cms itself is another reason this issue is now outdated.

    Finally, I must also add, the UI/UX for the D7 "update manager" used to be *much* worse before Bojhan started helping me fix it. 😂 I learned so much about usability through those efforts, and (pre-composer) core "update manager" was vastly improved by it from D8-D11. We definitely didn't fix everything, but we made real progress. I'm eternally grateful to all the time @Bojhan spent on those issues and efforts, for their generosity sharing their knowledge and expertise, and for their patience while I (and others) tried to implement and refine their suggestions. Formally crediting @Bojhan here for the issue write up, linked issues, etc.

    Deep thanks!
    -Derek

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