This one’s a little bit more complex, I think the main holdup with it’s implementation is due to how list views have previously been treated in Joomla, with the changes suggested elsewhere some cool new possibilities emerge.

Firstly, why have only one way to navigate and edit content? We could have more. Many sites use a more literal tree view for editing and adding content, this is REALLY easy to understand and it could easily be done in Joomla. It could be an additional editor, no need to scrap the old ones, or it could be added into core.

Here’s how the menu Manager would work with this:

1. Click the disclosure triangle next to a menu and the menu items load underneath via ajax.

2. Click on a menu item, if it’s an article, you see the article and can click to edit, if it’s a blog or list, you see the items in that section.

You could do the same thing with the category and article manager, click a category, see subcategories and articles in it, rinse and repeat.

It needs more thought, and a lot more design, but the benefit of this kind of view are many.

There already is some in the Joomla Admin, and I don’t think a lot is great, but just a little would be grand. The example is the AJAX Toggler Plugin It is GPL and just speeds up actions in list views including ordering, publishing and pagination, I’ve yet to find an issue with it it could just be in the native build.

This one is simple, the top level menu items in Joomla don’t link up, here is the menu for 1.6:

AdminPraise's Awesome Component View

Now one big plus, the site name finally links to the admin home (BIG high-five), as for the other links heres some obvious suggestions as to what they should link to:

• Site: Control Panel
• Users: User Manager
• Menus: Menu Manager
• Content: Content Manager
• Components: A view of all the components, AdminPraise has one, see screenshot
• Extensions: Extensions Manager
• Help: Joomla Help

Note, that all of these are the first item in the Menu, so totally logical (Except Components, but you knew that)

Joomla has the ability for component to have their own items in the drop-down menu, but only one level. This sucks and it means developers need to do all kinds of kludges to fix this. Virtuemart and Phil Taylor’s forms generators are examples of this:

The Fix

Allow the extensions menu to have multiple levels, 2 more should do it, then all the developers don’t need to have their own kludges and then we can have consistency and themability.

Furthermore, a left split menu module could be created so that it is available for all components, or just some. Screens aren’t getting any narrower. AdminPraise does this at the moment with a drop down, but mine would be accordian-style.