We have a lot settings, and there may be new ones coming. But this new system where that old menu of all site settings has been removed, is really hard to use.
I added new category that may generate more activity than others. And because it is ActivityPub connected I wanted mute it by default for users.
Now I have to know exacly what I need, because I can’t browse anymore. And if I don’t know (or I would be a virgin as an admin) I would be in problems.
Will this stay that way, or is this just a phase before something new? Or did I miss something obvious because of muscle memory?
It is a phase, and every setting groups aren’t yet in the sidebar?
And now I am really struggling… how do I change defaults for users? I just can’t remember what it is in English and general searches as user and default don’t give anything useful. Well, I’ll head to ask.discourse.com (or was it now .org… can’t remember that either, but DiscourseHub remembers ).
UX: Hide inner site settings sidebar if admin sidebar enabled (#31047)
This experiment hides the list of categories in the inner sidebar for the main site settings page if the admin sidebar is enabled. It also defaults the list of settings to “All” instead of a specific category. Our theory here is that people who use this page are using it to find an exact setting, not to go through the categories one by one. Our admin sidebar also has several groups of important settings already too, so that can be used for browsing. Finally, the input on the page focuses when you load it, so filtering is faster.
Well, that theory is wrong…
I would appreciate it if experiments have to be enabled explicitly…
Luckily the solution is in there, just remove yourself from admin_sidebar_enabled_groups…
Well, that is not a solution. It is more low level quick fix
Otherwise admin sidebar works. The site settings not because all of settings aren’t in the sidebar. I can learn new way to use site settings for sure, but then everything must be there, and that isn’t the situation. Or, as now, user defaults are hided very well.
I typically type something into the filter box to try to find a relevant setting for what I am trying to accomplish. And that (used to) gives me a filtered inner-sidebar, which helps me understand what settings-groups are involved… and then I often click in the inner-sidebar to focus on one of those groups and clear the filter text, so that I can explore if there are other adjacent settings that I need to fiddle with.
A problem with the Admin Sidebar overall is that it is trying to mash together the legitimate independent modules (e.g., “Customize email style”) with a slew of “pre-filtered subset of Site Settings” things without acknowledging that the latter are indeed just filtered subsets of the complete “Site Settings” pile. The inner sidebar is/was the mechanism for navigating that space in either direction.
I agree with the “get to a setting randomly and explore the whole category later”. Although I like the new UI very much, this use case is now missing. But I think it is still achievable if filtering would somehow group the settings by the subsections with links to those sections.
These are experiments for improving and simplifying the “staff experience”, and our team greatly appreciates hearing all the ways on how you admins use the filters and sidebar. That said, our main goal is to make things simpler for newer “staff” users, and yet also keeping things versatile as they have always been.
We’ve had some internal feedback as well that this may be quite a cheese move!
Please continue sharing your use cases so we can learn more.
Yes! In fact, even with the inner-sidebar scheme, it is impossible to tell which group a text-filtered setting is in, without clicking through the groups shown in the inner-sidebar, and to be honest, that has always been a bit annoying.
In terms of features/use-case: I want bidirectional connections between the different views/groupings of settings:
Admin Sidebar Links — and their groupings in the Sidebar
Individual setting on any Site Settings page/subset
Group of settings
etc
The various groupings are meaningful (yay!) but it is frustrating and disorienting if I drill down in one view and then cannot zoom back out through another view to explore the surrounding subspace (related admin links, related settings, related groups, etc). I want be able to switch contexts without having to search through Context B to find the same thing I was just looking at in Context A.
Oooh, a suggestion, maybe, on how to achieve this:
On the Site Settings page, add a group-name pulldown filter adjacent to the text-filter box (instead of the inner-sidebar list-of-groups as a de-facto filter).
Show the group-names inline as section separators within the Site Settings list (e.g., so that as you scroll through all settings, you can see the grouping/group).
(Maybe even implement the group-name display as one of those stick-at-top-of-scroll-area things)
The new per-group descriptions can be inlined following the name header as well.
Clicking on an inlined group-name heading should set the group-name filter to that group. (Not completely necessary, because the user can see the name right in front of them and can just select it from the filter pulldown, but it would make it extra smooth.)
The settings-only links/buttons in the Admin Sidebar can now act as shortcuts to a filtered-by-group Site Settings page.
E.g., clicking “Trust Levels” in the Admin Sidebar leads to the Site Settings page with the “Trust Levels” group preselected in the site-settings filter.
And the tricky part… as you move through sections in the Site Settings list, the Admin Sidebar should highlight/make-visible any corresponding link so that you can tell where you are.
…also, I’m not sure what to make of the Admin pages that have a “Settings” tab in addition to other tabs.
Just adding my voice after struggling to the find attachment size-related settings.
Searched with upload size, file size, weight, with no results.
I ended up using the only forum I had not running the last version, where I could finally find the settings Max attachment size KB and Max image size KB
Even after administrating several instances for years, I still need to use the old menu to find what I want
Apart from the obvious use case of filtering search results without refining your search term, I also liked that the filter provided a quick overview of which plugin settings were found. In cases where those were plugins I don’t use, and thus not interested in those settings, it was sometimes helpful to check which setting was obviously not the one I was looking for. For example, when searching for “tag group,” I wanted to find out whether I was looking for Tags listed by group or Show tags by group. Using the filter, it was one click to find out that one of them (and which one) was from the docs plugin.
Thanks for all the feedback here, folks - we appreciate the input and learning from your use case.
One of the problems the old grouping on the ‘all site settings’ page had was that it was becoming increasingly different to what’s in the sidebar, causing unnecessary confusion. Removing it means we only have one type of grouping for site settings, which is altogether less confusing. That being said, I can understand how the not having the settings grouped on this page can decrease the usability, since it is such along page of settings.
Some things we’re currently working on to remedy this include:
Grouping the settings on the 'all site settings` page using the same grouping the main navigation sidebar uses.
Visually distinguishing each group to make them easier to scroll through and navigate.
Ensuring that all settings show up somewhere in the main sidebar pages as far as possible.
A UI to track modified settings across different pages so you know what you’ve changed before saving them.
And we’re thinking about an admin-wide search feature, allowing you to search for specific settings from anywhere in the admin.
All of those updates together will mean that the main admin sidebar will be an efficient and useful way to find all settings for your site, the ‘all site settings’ page will be more usable, and specific settings will be easy to find.
I don’t want to search, I want to find. The difference is that with finding you don’t have to know what you’re looking for.
Regardless , can we please get the old groupings back until all the above remedies (apparently still in a “thinking about” phase) have been implemented? We’re now in a void. The old way wasn’t perfect but it was better than nothing (which is what we have now).
Thanks for the feedback here everyone! Based on this feedback, we have reverted this change and the inner sidebar has now been restored to the ‘all site settings’ page. It’s always great to hear how people use the software and what your workflows are, so please keep this feedback coming.
Here is the pull request for the revert for reference:
We are working on additional improvements to the page that will make navigation easier and more intuitive across the board, and we’ll post an announcement when these updates are ready.
And again… it doesn’t matter what menu we are browsing, as long there is a menu. And lack of some menu, or actually the menu isn’t including all settings, was the issue here. That means you guys introduced earlier thing than just a beta
For sure there will be lot of nagging when old is replaced with new one. It happens everytime everywhere. But as long such new one includes all individual settings, new names and location of groupings will ne accepted by old admins fo sure. Because finding settings is its primary function.
So thanks for fixing it, and now we can wait the team finnishing the new one.
).
cheese move!
