 I've been doing this session for like two and a half years at many events in the UK and various events by Skype and this is by far the most amount of people that have ever come to see my Tasty Backend. Except for Tuesday night in the Red Light District but I'm not gonna get into that here. So thank you all for coming. My name is Jenny Tien and this is the building a Tasty Backend session. If anybody can't hear me I'll be surprised because I'm quite loud. I make a lot of bad jokes and roll with it. If anybody has any questions throughout please feel free to raise your hand if anything I'm talking about or otherwise we'll just do questions at the end. So a bit about me once again there is my name. I'm a freelancer but I work under the name of Delicious Creative because I guess it makes me sound like a bigger company and people can call up to me and say hey can I speak to somebody in marketing and I'm like yeah that's me. I tell them to leave me alone. I'm originally from the US but I moved to the UK in 2006 for a job that I lost six years ago that was in Liverpool and then two years ago I moved to Brighton which has a pretty amazing Drupal scene pretty amazing kind of web and tech scene in general. Great place to be a freelancer as well. Lots of freelancers there and I've been using Drupal since about 2006 2007. At my old job I was dealing with some massive kind of static HTML sites and was looking into various CMSs here and there and just kind of settled upon Drupal because I figured out that using Drupal I could kind of configure ways for my boss to not be able to royally screw up all of the websites I was making for the company. Dream weavers evil in those regards. So thankfully that's all dead and now we have Drupal and back then it was Drupal 5 and thank God now we have Drupal 7 and 8 beta 1 out now which is pretty sweet. And this the last thing I once met Ghostface killer. Have we got any Wu Tang fans in the house? I don't know why I like to share that one but it was it was really random I went to go see him and just end up meeting them afterwards. They invited me and my friends back to their hotel room but we didn't go. There is a demo site if you want to play along at home at tastybackend.com I swear it's a safe website to visit and if you Google tasty backend I swear that's safe as well last I checked and I'm actually let me turn Twitter off I'm actually quite happy that when you Google tasty backend it's all my name that shows up. So I'm proud of that my mom maybe not but I am. So don't listen to me or okay listen to me but this isn't gospel this isn't you should do this exactly this is kind of a collection of things that I've done over the past six or seven years to kind of help my clients understand Drupal better use Drupal better Drupal has a reputation of being hard to use BS it's not hard to use it's up to you to make it easy to use so by all means pay attention to what I'm doing and please do listen but take it with a grain of salt take what I'm saying and adapt it to your own projects a lot of this is going to be Drupal seven demo stuff we'll talk a bit about eight along the way but a lot of the same concepts are going to apply to Drupal eight maybe we'll just use slightly different modules or techniques to get there but in the end customize it make your own tasty backend for your own clients so what is this all about what is the tasty backend Drupal is incredibly powerful I guess that's probably why we're all here we all love it but we're not normal what is it Wednesday we're all sitting in a room talking about Drupal instead of being at work quite often I do these talks in the weekends and people show up to to learn about it then we're freaks we're we we love this stuff we're the geeks we understand it so for us you know we can say oh these content types and taxonomy and everything else we understand it but our clients probably don't it's not their job to make websites it's their job to update their websites to use their websites we're the ones that have to make it easy for these people because power duh is powerful so let's make a streamline that a bit to give our clients the power they need without wrecking shop without while making it easy for them to be able to do what they do because all this power can be very overwhelming I've had a lot of clients over the years that have been small businesses maybe doing some e-commerce stuff maybe just looking for brochure where websites quite often I'd show them something I thought was quite easy and they just recoil in fear and we don't want that we don't need that so Drupal provides a good start for us and we have kind of basic content forms and basic management screens but it's only a good start the defaults are just kind of okay for me anyway because Drupal isn't a CMS this is very very important no matter when everybody tells you the Drupal CMS it's not a CMS it is a toolkit for building a CMS I got into an argument with a pub and in a pub with a guy a few months ago and he was saying oh I won't use Drupal I build a custom CMS for all of my clients and I said so do I I just happen to use a common set of tools that thousands of people across the world work on instead of you and your partner your systems secure and the bottom line is if you're only providing user one access you've failed sorry to be blunt about it but I'm a freelancer I work on a lot of other people's websites that come to me for help saying we don't know how to use this we don't know what's going on I log in and either every every user account that's been created if people have actually created other user accounts all have full admin rights or everybody is sharing user one login death if you don't want people to use your sites properly and you want to feel a lot of support requests because your views have gone missing or something by all means give your clients user one access otherwise customize it for them so we must help all of these people that we're making the websites for because our content admins are human we're the weirdos we're the freaks we're the robots we're the code monkeys or whatever else the people managing our sites are human so we need to simplify how they add their content how they manage their content and how they get around these are kind of the three basic things that goes into every kind of tasty back-end site that I do and we don't have to create the recreate the wheel to do this it's really easy I'm not being funny it really is that a bit of a sore throat so I apologize if I take a lot of drink breaks so what's the first thing what's the first thing that people often say to you when they want new website we want a website to create content we want to add blog posts we want to add case studies we want to add products or images or whatever else they're gonna update the blog once a year there's nothing we can do about that we're all guilty of that I'm quite guilty of it but that's the basic crux of what they want to do this is everything for new clients especially people new to Drupal and the basic forms are okay got an example here this is a basic page I've added a different taxonomy term to this but you know this is how it looks by default it's all right I guess this is a pretty simple content type so in the end not a whole lot going on but it works and the vertical tabs at the bottom helps kind of clean things up who remembers a lot of expending and collapsing field sets from Drupal 6 and Drupal 5 yeah my clients hated those I hated them as well for some reason it just kind of all the moving around and the the the links weren't obvious that they opened up something else and sometimes getting new users just to click something is quite hard so I was quite happy when vertical tabs were around I thought these were great the way that they work I thought was just absolutely brilliant and moderation isn't my style I like to do things big I like big hair I like big drinks I like come into big events so I was like screw it let's just vertical tab everything yeah everything I even put my mom in vertical tabs that's the biggest laugh I've ever gotten about that and that wasn't a good laugh if you notice mom is required as well so vertical tab everything Drupal 7 there's a great module called the field group allows you to group fields either in forms or on the front end for presentation for display and it's quite easy you do to the UI add a new group put your fields in it boom you got it and as of yesterday I think there is a Drupal 8 release which I'm very happy about moving forward because I rely on heavily not only for forms and things but it's quite easy to wrap things up in a in a group it shortens the forms and simplifies things so your clients once again don't recoil in fear so here we had this basic page like this let's just take a look at all in vertical tabs so already for me it's a lot simpler because everything that people need to see as soon as they want to add any of this content type is right in front of them and everything else is kind of hidden off to the side so it gets your forms to the point of the content everything else down here on these is for the most part unnecessary and everything here on the right for the most part in Drupal 8 is unnecessary the bottom line is giving your clients access or putting something right in their face as soon as they want to add that content means they don't have to worry about anything else so putting all of your important fields right up front greatly helps them just see exactly what it is they need to do they don't have to worry about anything else add a title add a body hit save you're done end up if you need any other options we have these menu settings URL path comments etc I'll come back to comments because this is a basic page content type and chances are our comments shouldn't be there our comments useful on basic pages for anyone yeah I don't think so so if I want to and the way Drupal just if you have comments able on your site will add this vertical tab everywhere we should get rid of this quite frankly because I don't because if something is there chances are someone's going to go looking around and all of a sudden you have an about us page with comments and yeah that doesn't work for me so once again we just add the basic fields necessary and hide everything else so this is quite basic example but what if we have a quite complex example let's take a look at this kind of content type here this is a product model on this website that's the content type we have text here we have this tabbed box here we have a table at the end we have images we have a video if they want it we have reference downloads don't mind the broken image that's not my fault I don't think I have stagefile proxy enabled or something but this is quite a complex content type and if we look at that the standard Drupal way title we have language on here this is a multilingual site they have to add a category they have this top top content field they have lower cost content productivity content safety content options content this whole table here video listing image more images links downloads I gotta catch my breath there's a lot of fields there's loads of fields here this is quite overwhelming to new people to have to fill out this giant form so we can do better let's kind of break this out into possibly how it's going to be displayed on the front end so we have a title we have a language everything here this is the basics for success in making this content type you don't need the images you don't need anything else we've got default it'll kick in if you don't add stuff but in the end this is all you need so when you do want to customize anything else when you do want items in this tabbed box down below you can click the tab box and you can just move through as you see here all the way into the table which is quite easy for people to add as well no whizzy wigs no messing around dragging tables and adding columns everybody that's a guaranteed way to screw up your website it also means that we can control this very fine grainly move things around send stuff off to other systems make a brand new theme and everything just works all the other benefits of fields that will won't go into here that's another session and you can just work your way down the list if you need them the keyword being if you probably don't if you do great you have it so this is much simpler in my humble opinion and they've had quite a good success in using it this way it also mimics what people see on the front with what they see on the back so we'll while I'm still waiting to see exactly how inline editing and things like that work in Drupal 8 tried it out a few times cool concept not sure how my clients will deal with it in the end people have traditionally liked the way I've done this so cool I'm sticking with it you can also hide very long lists of things some sites I work on we have hundreds of categories thousands maybe maybe there's a lot of entity references or other things and adding those to a form could be quite huge actually so if we go to add this not tasty content type you'll see an example here we got the title and then we just have tons of terms here and that makes the form long I know I said I like things big and better before but a big form doesn't work for me long forms don't work for me too much and maybe they don't even need categories this field is optional so if we look at that the tasty version once again minimum for creating the content type is right up front title and body categories hides that you only have to see this massive list if and when you need it so if we have other lists of references we can hide those in there as well once again just making the form look more shorter and easier to fill out but in the end you still have the added complexity if and when you need it on a side note I make a lot of dating sites so if anybody does look at my website then you'll see that a lot of dating sites on there I deal with a lot of join forms and we've done a lot of testing with various forms over the years and we often settle on a version of a form which either has each field presented to the end to the user individually for signups or only half of them and when we did that we noticed the conversions go up a lot because people thought the form was easier to fill out only seeing one or two fields at a time so in the end I've kind of got proof that this maybe works at least if you want to get people to sign up to a dating site so yeah you can add in a lot more fields I'm making it look huge and you can also add in additional complexity everybody here loves carousels right clients love carousels everybody hates everybody else hates carousels but what ends up happening you have a maybe a carousel node content type or maybe using ECK you create like a custom entity type to handle all that stuff watch my what the X talk if you're interested in that on this one on this site we decided to stick a vertical tab in here just in case they wanted to add this blog entry to the front page slideshow so normal blog entry they just go to add it title and body and they can add images etc down here but if they wanted to add something to this front page slideshow this carousel they don't have to then go create another piece of content and reference this node which is a very droopy way of doing things I sometimes do things like that a lot myself but here we decided let's just stick it in here because it doesn't matter so we have all of these options for adding something to the to the front page carousel which means that all the images everything automatically links back here if when we need to they know that if they need to edit something on that particular slide they just go to the blog post for that and they can edit it right there and if this was a normal form something along these lines this would make the form unnecessarily huge all of these fields are completely unnecessary unless especially with a blog you might have hundreds of blog posts but you might only want three featured on the homepage so this way you only have to look at it once again if and when you need it so you can hide additional complexity without adding or you can add additional functionality without adding complexity which will help your users once again in the in the long run so jupy eight content forms once again looking like this do people like this are people happy with it for the most part I know it's kind of word-pressy in some ways it's all right for me I'm looking for ways to get rid of this already I think that these items on the right once again aren't really used all that often I think promotions I don't quite often use these kinds of things sometimes so I've been working a little bit and I have found my jupy AVM is incredibly slow I've already gotten rid of it which is good I'm still working on getting all of it in vertical tabs but with the field group now having a date release I'm hoping that I can continue to do this in the future but once again if you like those by all means leave them but hopefully we'll have some better ways to customize things because it took me a little lot of figure out how to get around that as it turns out it was just an after build adding it in the formulture fun stuff so ah wrong as of as of what I looked at earlier today field group is has a release haven't tested it so hopefully and obviously this is wrong as well because as of an hour ago I've overridden that so next time I'll get my slides updated before I actually do the talk so further node form cleansing disable the preview button it doesn't work it doesn't give you a preview it confuses clients loads so don't use it hopefully we'll have I think there may be some work on that in DA I'm not really sure real previews anyone yeah is it working cool haven't tested it so sweet maybe maybe hopefully in the future I can get rid of this from the D8 slides it as well all these reasons now obviously we we're all gonna have seven sites to still work on to maintain probably still building some over the next couple years as things in eight get ironed out and contribute catches up because the clients are expecting something else especially if you're using an admin theme they're going to expect to see exactly what people are going to see and they don't so instead of offering something that doesn't work properly just get rid of it if people do need previews and they're creating new content I say just don't publish it and then have a look at it and then when you're ready go ahead and publish it if there is other content that's already in there use revisioning or workflows for preview functionality the revisions in core won't give you that but the revisioning module will set up different workflows for you for your revision so you can actually see a revision before it gets pushed out to be the live one and that works quite well and to keep going from there if it's on the page and it shouldn't be get rid of it people will click stuff whether it's a bread crumb or an item in the form that comments box for instance that I showed you earlier which I will be getting rid of in the future get rid of it once again people will go in there they'll call you you don't want to get called you want to get your work done no support get rid of it and if you want to do some dev hook form altar is great for all that stuff but if you don't you can use rules and rules form support module to handle a lot of that stuff which will allow you to disable things in the UI and things along those lines really helps clean things up and it's not just content we can do this for commerce products anything else custom entities using eck I have an example here of an e-commerce site and working on the triple commerce and this is a kind of combo product type that I have added and we have the the previews the licensing status I've also done some crazy stuff where if you select a download or a printed product it changes the quantities and adds in some other quantity options here but once again it's not just for content if you have a form or if your users are entering information anywhere clean it up it's not Drupal's job to know what you're building so clean it up managing content is the other big thing and the default content page isn't really up to the task and any sort of complex site if we have a look we all know what this looks like yeah it's basic it's got some filters here but it doesn't have very useful information about your content types if you have complex content types what if you have an image content type wouldn't it be nice to actually see a thumbnail of the image on the management screen for that I think so so for me this isn't up to snuff and there's also way too many clicks if you only want to see things of a certain content type you have to in it you have to use a filter and you don't have specific enough information so views bulk operations is our best friend here it's been around for a while and I'm always surprised at some of the people that don't know about it especially now that it's in core which is fantastic so now everybody will know about it but with use book operations you can create custom management screens for all of your content types and customize them for the complex content that you have on your sites instead of giving everybody the default customize it for the actual website you're building once again Drupal doesn't know what you're building so it can only provide a basic default so admin screens that suit the content if we go over here which one should we look at we'll go back to this example here manage content we were talking about product models before so here is a custom view to manage all of the product models and as you see we already have the categories the types the language etc and this is all customizable through views so if you know how to use views not a problem and we're already seeing much more relevant information then this could ever provide and you can customize all the filters as well if and when you have to clients have been finding this quite good it shows irrelevant information on complex content types as you see the categories and product types here and it gives the clients access to easy and for relevant information and while building sites it gives me or you that says you access to relevant information being a freelancer or making websites is quite hard to get clients to kind of get that information out of them sometimes so sometimes discovering the relationship of content for me anyway can take a long time to figure out exactly how things should go but if I have a screen that I can look at and see the relationship I know the relationship of the content better that's going to help me build a better website and it's going to help them manage their website much better as well so everybody is better all around and yes use bulk operations is included in Drupal 8 core which is sweet all the default management screens the content screen the user management screen those are all views so you can easily override them or you can clone them to make a new one I generally prefer to leave kind of core stuff as it is and make new ones obviously your mileage may vary but it means that all of this stuff that we're doing here you can easily do right in core and since the core comes with these views you can use those as a starting point for any custom views you might want to make down the line as well but we don't want homeless views do we we don't have any real section to manage all of these so let's make one there's a great module called contextual administration which shows a lot of things but one of the things it does do is allow you to create custom admin sections in your site which will essentially just list menu links it will be it will be consistent with the say node ad screen it allows you to create basically pages like this it also does a lot of other stuff custom user management taxonomy management hold hold much bunch more but what I usually do is make a manage content section to hold all of these management views admin manage content and then from there for this as an example if you go to that page now we have all of the menu items that are children of this and we have a nice place to put all of these so we have a family home now for all of our fusible cooperation children and that's all nice and sweet and great they have a place to live so contextual administration also creates admin areas for items that users might not have access to who's ever ticked those taxonomy permissions for edit and deleting the terms and then thought well crap now how do my clients access this yeah like because you might not want to give administer taxonomy permissions I don't I probably have admin taxonomy is that I don't want my day-to-day users managing the content to be able to mess around with but if you don't give that full permission in Drupal 7 you don't have a management screen they can't drag and drop the the the terms to actually edit or delete a term you have to navigate to the taxonomy slash term slash term ID page and click the edit tab and that's messy it's also hard to find so context admin allows you to create custom admin screens for things like taxonomy terms and it really makes those permissions make sense the edit and delete permissions so for example here I see we use this as a better example we have a categories menu item here and you'll see we have language media type these are all these we weren't using translation in this site just warning language as a category works fine for those things just in case anybody thinks I'm crazy but we'll go to say media type here and this looks very much like the normal taxonomy management pages but it's not if we look at the URL we'll see that it's actually it's actually admin manage categories media underscore type so this now we this user role wouldn't have a screen like this without context admin so the context admin module is great for doing stuff like that menus that remember the third thing how people get around toolbar as being the one putting together the sites I love admin menu I like the toolbar style as well looks nice so for me the default toolbar just isn't up to it and that also uses the what is it the management menu by default whereas for me the way that Drupal starts to put the ad content links into the navigation menu that makes a lot more sense to me because the primary thing that my users are doing is adding content managing content so if Drupal is already gonna start putting things in that menu I'm just gonna use that navigation menu for their basic admin menu it also means that they won't accidentally see links that aren't appropriate for them they also won't accidentally click on things that might get them an access denied so I always customize that in the navigation menu and it also but the problem with navigation menu is by default where does Drupal puts that in a block like say you have Bartek you know when you first you know fire up a standard install or something it puts the navigation menu in a block in the first sidebar now that's not really great because what if you don't have sidebars you know what if you have a left sidebar at one point then you get into an interior page and it's in the right sidebar now your admins are confused about where their menu is into where they have to look to add stuff so get that get anything administrative out of your front-facing theme by all means is get rid of it now toolbar does that seven toolbar does that in a admin menu does that in seven and it's I've tested it in eight haven't been looking at work properly but always use some sort of an administration menu don't rely on blocks and putting things in regions in your front-facing thing and I use admin menu source for that now admin menu source module allows you to select a menu say the navigation menu and have that menu rendered in the admin menu module so it'll have this style and you can customize it per roll so this user role that I'm logged in on this site here you'll see this looks kind of like the user one menu because it's using the admin menu module but this is actually the navigation menu this user role that I'm logged in with here this is all completely customized for them depending on the site that they need to use this is a commerce site so we have products and managing and orders we have categories files everything is customized for the people that need to do this there's three different user roles on this site there's a content admin who basically gets ad content managed content and categories there's a store admin all they can access is the product manage products ad products and orders and there's a user admin who gets access to the users out of the out of the front facing theme quite easy to navigate one click to get anywhere you need it's great yeah I guess I've gone through all these already as customizable per roll so if you do have multiple roles that you need to say you have different complete menus for them you can do so for my three user roles on this site I just use a navigation menu for all three if they don't have access to the menu items they just won't show up which is great Drupal does that for you but if you need to if you have a specialized role and you want to give them an admin menu you can create a completely separate menu and say this role use this menu end up Drupal 8 admin menus toolbars cool I like it especially on mobiles moving forward I'd like it to be customizable I would love to be able to plug my own menus into it but it's also too many clicks so I'm maybe on maybe thinking to continue with the admin menu for you just on desktops and maybe using toolbar for your users on tablets and mobiles that's a much better experience admin menu on a mobile is horrific because it's using covers and stuff like that so it's not going to be great so we got a good starting point in eight let's try to refine that make it better moving forward users sometimes content that admins need to be user admins as well you know we I don't want somebody to call me up and say I need to add new user to the site but I also don't want to give everybody that has access to the site the ability to manage users that's a massive security risk outside of that I don't want my clients to know there's a user one at all I don't want them to see it so if any of them are watching it's it's not there I swear so if we make some custom screens for that we can use view spoke operations and context admin to do the same thing so if I go back here and I go to manage users this is not the default page oh emails I should get that off there I didn't think of that but on that page the user one doesn't exist the user one is not there they can't click it and see it and go oh what what's this user something that has admin in the name or something you know they can't see it so they're not going to start messing with my account roll delegation module also greatly helps because it allows you to oops it allows you to say this user role the user admin can only assign these other user roles if you're using say a standard Drupal install or you're using a which comes with an administrator role which automatically assigns all administrative permissions to that role I don't want people to be able to assign that chances are the people managing the users on my site stay today they're not going to understand all that stuff so they shouldn't be assigning people as administrators so they can assign other people as content administrators or maybe store administrators or even other user admins but they don't have the ability to decide to assign all of the roles so a lot of this is really kind of taking Drupal's everything approach and narrowing it down to only what you need to do and as a bonus control access to user settings is a nice module as well because it allows you to say these people this user role can manage users but not how users can register or the text that goes out along with that for in emails that is so moving forward there is an install profile to taste you back and install profile it's still only on github I started on there a while ago I was really hoping that by the time this rolled around I'd have gotten my button gear and had a proper release on Drupal.org but it hasn't happened yet so it's still there and also I don't have any full projects I need to get approval if anybody wants to help me with that I would be very much appreciated so if you want all of this stuff that the tasty back end of in showing you the tasty back end install profile will do all of it for you so every time you add a content type it will add a management screen for that content type every time you add a new vocabulary and you assign the edit and delete permissions to users to your say your your custom user role it will automatically create those management screens for you it will add menu items for administrating menu items that's one thing I forgot to mention actually you also notice here Drupal by default has administer menus or basically nothing I don't want my users to mess around with the management menu or the navigation menu I want them to use the footer menu the header menu the main menu menu admin per role is the module for that I highly recommend it basically says content admins can manage these menus and that's it so as a side note so please anybody check that out test it out it is an install profile but there is a base module a media module web form standard there are pluggable modules or modules outside of it that you can add to an existing site so if you have an existing site that you want to add this type of stuff to you can add those to an existing site I really need help with testing that so if anybody can contribute that would be great so you can kind of add tasty back into existing sites on top of that you've seen that there's a tasty back-end media module web form and commerce is coming soon so if you have any of these other contribute modules on your site you can have tasty back-end views and other things that happen to manage those certain things so there's even I'm trying to put as many add-ons into it as well depending on the sites that I'm working on I don't always use media pretty much always web form although entity form seems to be all the rage at the moment obviously I'm not building every single site as a commerce site but when I do I want to be able to add all this stuff to it and these modules will give you all those tools to do so so now release of eight beta one today so the future is definitely eight but we've got work to do a lot of the stuff that I rely on a lot of stuff that I think should be in core that's a part of the tasty back-end isn't yet I'm gonna try the next three months try to help out and with a lot of that stuff so hopefully I'll have some better tasty back-end stuff in the future for D8 watch this space but all of these modules as of today or recently weren't working that great for me or have releases at all admin menu source does not I believe admin menu does field group now does but the rest of these from what I know do not and modules such as role delegation to allow users to add other user roles override node options and view on published for me are modules that I put in every project and quite frankly I think should be maybe in core I don't know but they're quite useful override node options for anybody allows you to say these people this user role can only make things published or unpublished so it'll hide all the rest of the promoted sticky etc view unpublished allow certain user roles to view all unpublished content of a certain type so things like that make a lot more sense to me hopefully we'll get there in the end any questions of his microphone there for anybody that would be great I haven't seen the part of people managing their menus have you have tips and tricks because it's quite confusing sometimes you put it on on the note form yeah to edit it and to edit to menu then you have to choose one of the menus that are available for it find the right spot yeah and sometimes you want it on two places in menus then we have to go to the menu yeah I mean the only the only thing I can really see about menus is just kind of using the what was it the menu admin per menu module to make sure to lock that down the only ones they can edit and then outside of that making sure that you have a good you're adding the menu items to this this one here so they can have easy access to it I don't you know things end up in multiple menus on a lot of sites I do and yeah you just kind of have to go in and add them I don't there there might be other stuff and can trip out there that allows you to do it while you're creating the node I'm not I'm not aware of any so the best I've found from menus is just using that and as you'll see it just gives you access to these screens which is great so and it also means that you know even like even the listing page that lists all the menus all the rest of the menus aren't there so they won't even know they exist anyone else hello do you have tips or tricks to for example visualizing the links between content and something more advanced because this is for like the really basic users our problem usually is that we create kind of complex content types and we have admins who are capable of handling these things but the UX kind of sucks as a lot of like maybe references yeah yeah things what I did what I tend to do mostly we go back to this one as an example for these product models these product categories and product types are actually references here so I just like to show as much stuff on the admin screens as humanly possible so that way they can know these filters are probably should have made drop-downs that would have made a lot more sense but then that way you can say you know anything that references counterbalance you can filter down to all of that stuff I don't know we could probably come up with some ways to visualize things but are the kind of relationships I think I saw a dev module out there that used a graphing solution for those kind of things and it kind of hooked into entity reference so you could visualize maybe the relationship between data not something I personally looked into but I do believe there's something out there now doing that I think I saw that going around the Twitters at some point yeah I'd be really interested in that the other question would be about kind of VC week versus like really well-structured content types because usually well there is to extend to you can define like really well-grained like you have this box you have three tabs so you define like all the stuff there or you can create like fields for these yeah but when people need like kind of flexibility and when you're not sure what they're gonna do yeah there's this kind of gap yeah there's that's a that's a massive debate I was I did a buff at um in Prague last year about that talked about some different solutions a lot of it in the media for eight yesterday they were showing off some great things using references for images and things along those lines which is definitely a lot better than people just putting HTML markup into a text area because it's that's just a recipe for disaster and in the long run especially when it comes to responsive sites or if you're pushing content out to other systems or mobiles or apps or anything along those lines a fieldable approach for me is always better but then you do lose that flexibility so I what I if you notice you haven't seen a whizzy wig on any of the examples I've shown I don't tell clients about them and then if they ask for them I kind of take that approach anyway give them the least amount and then make them ask for more if they need something like that some sort of a flexible content type maybe we'll do that with a basic page or have some sort of flexi not not flexi node as and back in that that module but something along those lines so they can have it but I tend to try to steer people more toward a temperate approach and if they do need options I'll put options on the nodes and then you can also use things like display suite and panels and panelizer etc to give people more kind of layout options but for basic stuff I'll most likely just give people options saying or maybe build in two or three layouts and put a field on there that then selects the layouts or I think display suite does some stuff like that as well so I tend to go that way and the the big argument I use quite often is responsive because it's quite easier just to make sure you control you you control all the markup completely in that in those regards for instance I had a client recently where we just added a new theme and they were quite concerned about how things are going to go outside of that and I said well listen everything has been controlled since day one on here when the new theme is ready I'm just going to enable it and it's all going to work and it did and they were like oh yeah great whereas if stuff was in you know loads of markup in a text area that would have been an absolute nightmare especially given the there's this this website had a few thousand kind of landing pages and things so that would have been an absolute nightmare to kind of go through all those so I I'm in the camp of fields and templates and WYSIWYG must die although having CK editor in core I'm quite happy about because it means we finally get good results for when I do have to do that stuff and normally if I do put a WYSIWYG into a site I'll put basics bulbs headings things like that maybe an image but I try to steer people away from that because obviously I like using BU editor and things like that and the people managing the content and a lot of these sites are okay with that just putting HTML in there but I'm perfectly okay with the WYSIWYG for headings and bold text and basic text formatting things like that. Alright, thanks. Okay so you're asking if I do the user tests basically as a freelancer I don't have projects with large budgets so I don't normally have a phase of that but I'm constantly badgering clients to say make sure as I'm rolling out new features it's your responsibility to start using them let's go through that there's live screen shares on Skype and things along those lines so and quite frankly a lot of the things that I've come up with over the years for this I've learned from clients having the same problems kind of over and over again and after I started doing things these ways I stopped getting support emails and calls so for a lot of people especially if I'm working with a lot of the same agency is over and over again I'll add something new to the sites I'll say it's now on your admin menu check it out I also hope that my approach in templating things is fill out the form hit save and you're done you can't screw it up with a WYSIWYG you know somebody once described WYSIWYG to me as WYSIWYG which is what you see is what you break so with this approach it's pretty much unbreakable and I often say try and break it go for it try and break it hasn't happened yet so we've got somebody waiting at the mic hi I have a question about menus yes we have a lot of customers having large menus sometimes yeah do you have any solutions for that we tend to use work bench access for creating a smaller amount of menu options okay I don't know if you know that module I have I have used it some of the kind of work bench stuff I don't like to shoehorn my stuff into I've I'm the kind of person that likes okay there's something out there that does it but I'll build it with flag and rules for some reason but by all means if it works for you that's great I was looking for a different solution maybe I haven't I there's probably something out there I haven't looked at it in a while especially like this site here there's multiple languages and multiple menus per language and there's a lot of menu items so in the end I don't have a perfect solution for that anything here is just kind of going into you know just the way that just core menu stuff so yeah we have a lot of menu items thanks okay hello I basically have two questions the first one is you didn't mention anything about the contextual links module is in Drupal core are you against it or every time I turn it on it screws up something royally in my front-facing theme and I end up having to work around it and it drives me nuts so I just turn it off okay it's I keep wanting to use it and then I keep going oh man so if people need more stuff like that then it's say in a view for it if you're viewing a node I don't think you get contextual links but something like a content type it's quite easy to just if you have a view to put view edit and delete links in the view if you need to and since that will all you know views is checking permissions they won't appear for anonymous users and things items like menus and other places where contextual links show up I think the approach was always having this menu there and having clear top-level menu items and making you know using admin menu which means you only have one click to get anywhere you need I've found people have had good results with that so they know that even if they're looking at the front-facing theme and they see I want to edit this so if we're going to look at this site and they say oh okay well we have this menu here I want to edit that they know that they can go to you know header menu that's not a good sign so bad example Firefox is crashing ah embarrassing anyway so that's that's I I keep wanting to have been for some reason like for instance actually on that site there's mega menus that dropped down and views was I think putting in a contextual links wrapper around it that was preventing the mega menus from dropping down because it was all display none so I have problems like that with it so I just end up not using it okay and the second question is it's more about the case study when you are using panels on the website because this example is basically using only the default Drupal stuff with a little bit with some yeah I don't I don't use panels yeah so my question is irrelevant then every every so often I do and I haven't I haven't found anything different really panels for me normally has been for if I need to give something to somebody else and give them modules that reproduces things when I don't know what the system is going to be put in is doing I sometimes use panels because it pretty much ensures things will come out the same way at the other end but I I haven't done a lot with panels for the most part I tend to use context and things like that for the most part so okay so the question is the biggest complaints I'm getting from the customers right now in the current setup that I'm not delivering things fast enough I think that's the most common complaint for everybody most likely I I haven't had any people tend to get on with it after I kind of show them the intro stuff it's it's not rocket science to have an admin menu and you know so basically in let's go back to this is a more up-to-date version using admin menu source instead of well this was using quick bar just so you know this was a module called quick bar that I've since stopped using because admin menu source and admin menu was a better experience for me but once I've started doing this I haven't had that many issues if anything it's been more just kind of Drupal complaints or something like for instance there was a complaint on this site that once that when people were adding products to upload the files that they kept going to the to because there's this site is selling downloads that they kept going to the files menu and I kept just having to explain that's there for after the fact we're just putting files into the system if you have to add a product to a download to sell you have to use that file field I guess that's more of a just kind of an understanding thing than anything else but I haven't had any major complaints if anybody has any major complaints about this bring those up as well I'd like to know after seeing this okay so okay so the clients want to put money into the front end of the site and not the back end I don't clients don't know that I'm doing this I just do it this and people people have asked me in the past how many how much percentage of a project has this taken you to do say I don't know a day and if you're if you're working on a project that's two or three months long or whatever a day in total I mean all these views in things don't take very long to build you can have one and then just clone them and modify it and if you're using the tasty and now that tasty back and install profile is there I've been using that on some new sites I've been doing it just happens for anything for that for it'll give you basic the tasty back in profile will give you a basic views book operation view for each content type you have it's up to you to then customize it but all the hard work is already there you have a base view for everything so and all you have to do is okay well we have images add an image field that's going to take five minutes five ten minutes so in the end clients haven't really had any issue with it they've just never really known they just kind of think this is the way things get put together if anything when I've gone into sites I didn't build and then have done this type of thing then they go oh wow that's so much easier so I think in the end they don't know what's there it doesn't take a lot of time so there's no real necessity to have it as a line item or anything else on the on the project or charge extra for it or anything along those lines for me it's just a standard way of doing things so if I'm gonna quote something for a project you know price is going to be in there already so they don't know anyone else yes well no I mean seven theme okay the question is about responsive forms in in I guess in Drupal 7 really in particular vertical tabs they don't work if you're using seven theme and I usually do in Drupal 7 they don't collapse or anything Drupal 8 they collapse to field sets which is great or an accordion thing so that is a very nice like that's brilliant when I saw that I was so happy about it so that's a brilliant experience on mobile so in Drupal 8 there's gonna be a much better admin experience for people on mobiles or tablets anyway so in seven in the meantime this doesn't do it there there may be I subscribed to a thread about that and there may be some code that gets back ported or something or you could write your own module or something there could be admin themes out there that are helping to better use or in better the experience for admins on mobiles as well I don't know at the moment I haven't had any anybody ever ask about managing their content on a mobile I think all of my clients do this stuff while they're at work and then when they go home or if they're out and about they don't touch it so it's you know and I do think that mobile friendly admin stuff is a very good thing to have so but I think seven at the moment it's just not up to it anyone else any other questions please provide feedback that's the note ID for the Amsterdam site on this and since I have a captive audience I have to put up all my contact info I am a freelancer hire me and thank you very much for coming I've got to say just a quick note I mentioned early about jobs and stuff like that and six years ago I lost a job I was really kind of getting started in Drupal and six years later here I am presenting at Drupal con this is the best F in community on earth thank you so much