Enhance user experience with customizable dashboards

The Standard Profile ships several "personas" to match the roles (e.g. Admin, Content Editor, etc), and we have some kind of way of matching a Dashboard to one or more roles (maybe just used the conditions system that Blocks use for visibility, but with only role based conditions, none of the page stuff);

Roles are additive, so an admin can also be a content editor - if someone has more than one role, and each role matches a dashboard variant, how do you choose which dashboard they get? We also don't have metadata for roles except for the special superuser admin role, i.e. there's not really a way to indicate precedence.

It would be a lot simpler to use the existing block visibility system - i.e. you either have access to a block or you don't, and then the combination of roles/permissions that you have determines which blocks show in your dashboard. This would mean only one dashboard with blocks that might or might not show on it.

Roles are additive, so an admin can also be a content editor - if someone has more than one role, and each role matches a dashboard variant, how do you choose which dashboard they get? We also don't have metadata for roles except for the special superuser admin role, i.e. there's not really a way to indicate precedence.

But roles do have weights, and the UI tells you to weight them from least powerful to most. So we could just say “the heaviest role the user has” or whatever.

Here's the relevant help text at the top of /admin/people/roles on 10.1.x:

Here, you can define the names and the display sort order of the roles on your site. It is recommended to order roles from least permissive (for example, Anonymous user) to most permissive (for example, Administrator user).

Especially given the proposal includes "customize your own" and we're just talking about a default dashboard setup for you, the one based on your most permissive role seems totally fine.

There's a group of people that have been working on this for a couple of months already, and on today's call we discussed that we need to update this idea, but you beat us to do that.

While we work on that, some links:

* We are communicating in the #dashboard channel on slack.
* We have a sandbox at https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/penyaskito/3327580 →
* You can find a demo at https://github.com/penyaskito/dashboard-initiative
* You can see the demo online at https://main-ps44ayjkzq3gdy5zk1fifpraj8ctkihy.tugboatqa.com/

But roles do have weights, and the UI tells you to weight them from least powerful to most. So we could just say “the heaviest role the user has” or whatever.

That still tracks to essentially security concerns rather than UX. 'User admin' would usually be the 'heavier' role than 'content admin' for security reasons, but this doesn't mean it's the main role of the account. Say I'm a content admin on d.o and have blocks with comments and nodes to review, then I get additional user admin access to block spammers and suddenly those blocks disappear.

I did have one thought which would be to implement the role based dashboards as tabs, and then you'd have access to whichever ones you have access to. Has its own problems but would mean that people don't lose access to stuff they're relying on when roles are added.

So, for context, I think we've moved past the idea of this being based on roles and instead are focusing more on Dashboards which meet specific personas.

So for example, you could have a dashboard focused on content creation/management, or another one focused on site administration. My ideal vision (and this is just my perspective) you could decide to place a dashboard anywhere that made sense, so for example you might decide to place a content focused dashboard under /admin/content, and then it would appear there as a tab.

OK if that's no longer the plan it's probably not worth talking about the drawbacks with it, but tagging for issue summary update.

The efforts reminds me ✨ Add simple blank page creation capability Needs work

Updating issue summary with existing plan and proposal. We're organizing ourselves at the #dashboard and #admin-ui channels in Drupal Slack for anybody willing to get involved or with any questions.

It might be an option to consider an initial dashboard that shows various things based on permissions only, and otherwise isn't customisable. Tailored ones per persona are obviously better, but the current state of seeing /user is really bad. So this could be a two-phased approach with the first one being the same for all and later versions being customisable.

Wordpress and Joomla provide standard dashboards and they're not perfect, but still better.

Or maybe this is a separate task to create a nicer destination for login? Since it seems based on #18 this has expanded a bit beyond just the login use case.

@pameeela That's mostly the plan :D

You can see the current progress at https://www.drupal.org/project/dashboard → . There is a tugboat link available that you can use for a live demo of the standard profile defaults (admin/admin, editor/editor). Join #dashboard on Slack if you want to discuss, we should shortly update again this idea description.

Ah very cool! I missed that detail in the issue summary that it was building on an existing contrib module. It looks awesome!