How to get a proper administration backend in drupal

Drupal 6 backend sucks. If you watch a screencast 99% of all drupal power users just types in the url instead clicking 3 times to get to a menu item. After a while i found admin_menu:

“Administration menu module provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. navigation, back-end) for Drupal. It’s a helper for novice Drupal users coming from other CMS”

A big disadvantage of admin menu is that it doesn’t integrate in the UI of drupal at all some may that as an advantage but i disagree. I dislike the mix of backend & frontend themes and the possibility to edit content in the frontend theme in Drupal at all. For most users this is confusing because you switch between two different themes not knowing why.

In drupal 7 there will be huge interface changes and it will be the most effective UI for drupal ever (check here for more info) . If you don’t want to wait until mid 2010 you can get some of the UI changes of drupal 7 backported to drupal 6.

“The admin module provides UI improvements to the standard Drupal 6 admin interface. It implements some of the ideas being explored for usability improvements in Drupal 7, including those by the Drupal usability team, Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt. The project aims to provide those working on Drupal usability with immediate feedback on their ideas and designs to ensure that they are flexible and scalable enough to meet the needs of production Drupal sites in real-world situations.”

The vertical tabs module got into core of drupal7  and are only available as a back-port version for Drupal 6.