In looking around the Habari admin panel I’ve got to thinking which areas are important to me in the way that I use the software and how to take care of those pesky little design issues which I see as glaring mistakes. These are the areas that I feel could use a little bit of design TLC, which basically will give the software that added bit of polish and maintain it’s elegance.

I’m currently in the process of learning PHP, so hopefully in a few month’s time I’ll have hopefully created the plugin to deal with these few issues. If they’re seen as a good idea, then maybe they can be included into the core, but I’m more interested in getting the software to do what I personally would like it to do, good ideas often times find their way back up the trunk. If someone wants to jump in now, I’m not going to stop you, and will gladly help where I can.

Dashboard

When you get into the Dashboard, you currently get a small paragraph above the rest of the cards. This paragraph has some information specifically relating to your site. The issue for me here is that it's completely out of context with the rest of the admin panel, as it's the only place where such text exists.

Solution: This information should be collected into another card that sits with the rest of the cards and can be moved around in the same fashion to suit the person’s preferences.

Drop Down Sub-Menu Items

The current implementation of the drop down menu is that a sub-menu item slides out from the side of the main item. This implementation was considered the best option due to the fact that as you add more and more plugins, their menus will increase the main menu greatly, making it too long.

Solution: I would go even more minimalist. As an everyday user, I don’t actually need to have most of these options available on my screen. I don’t need to have:

1. Logs

2. Theme

3. Users

4. Import

5. Groups

6. My Profile

Personally, the only secondary options that I would like to have are the Options and Plugins (secondary options being New, Manage, Comments and Tags). Other people might have a different approach, but again I would probably argue that every person has got options in that menu which they rarely use.

To that end, I would reinstate the original design of having a sub menu present inline of the main menu item. Within the ‘Option’ page there would be an additional section which would allow the end user to ‘hide’ some of the menu items. The only backend menu items that would be present as a default would be the Dashboard, Options and Logout. You would then reduce the length by 6 lines deep.