While I don't think we're alone in this, Drupal developers in higher education often face a very high need to create sites that are easy for non-technical users to administer. More often than not, college and university departmental websites are maintained by employees with other responsibilities and little web experience; how do we ensure that they can use (and love using) their content management platform?

Yesterday I went to a very helpful session at DrupalCon San Francisco geared towards this question: Making Drupal Admin Simple. Since so many of us need to do just that, I thought I'd share some of the helpful pointers they provided (and recommend that, once it's online, you watch the session recording).

1. Use an administration menu. It doesn't really matter what you use, so long as your users have an easy, persistent, well-organized list of administrative tasks they can perform. Currently at UNT we use the admin_menu module for this (as does Acquia Drupal); however, after seeing it demoed in the presentation, I'm very, very tempted to switch our distribution to use Admin 2.
2. Use an administration theme. Again, after seeing it demoed in the presentation, I'd highly recommend Rubik for this purpose. Not everybody likes using separate administration themes, but they provide a couple of important benefits you may not have considered:
   1. A good admin theme drastically simplifies the site layout so the user only has to see what he/she is editing at the time; no header, no irrelevant sidebar blocks, etc.
   2. Admin themes also help the user know they're about to do something; they're a subtle visual cue saying, "careful, what you do here affects the site."

3. Allow the user to edit in context. While it's tempting to tell your administrative users to find their content through Drupal's backend content list, it's not very user-friendly. Plus, if they have to find the content on the site to edit it, they'll know whether or not that content is located somewhere where visitors can find it too.

   Also worth noting: if you use a lot of nodereference fields, you should really consider installing noderelationships; among other things, it allows the user to create and edit related nodes while editing their parent, a big improvement over having to find those related nodes manually.

4. Provide help in context. At UNT we tend to rely on our centralized documentation site to show users how to work with Drupal; however, there are some modules out there that allow you to inject full-blown documentation into the Drupal administrative interface itself. Check out helpinject to learn more.

They discussed quite a few additional concepts, but those were the ones that really got me thinking. How about you? Have you made any particular improvements on your sites so that inexperienced site admins can do their job more easily? Please feel free to describe in the comments!