Joomla administration pain #1

Joomla is a great project. It’s saved budding content providers like bloggers thousands in software costs and has helped create a whole industry around custom components and templates.

However, despite it’s general usefulness, there are several usability issues I’ve experienced with Joomla content administration as a novice user.

One pain I have with Joomla’s content management system is a minor one, but frustrating none the less. This particular pain is one that’s probably only relevant to new content providers who are still mucking around with their website content structures.

The problem has to do with deleting content using the default administration control panel. If you try to delete a whole content “category”, a message appears to prevent you from deleting it if there is a “section” that still contains content. If you try to delete a “section”, you can’t unless there isn’t any content in it.

Now you say, what’s so bad about that? Isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t such a safety feature prevent accidental deletion of content? Yes, this safety feature is good in principle, but it’s the lack of guidance through deletion process and the extended time on task that irritates me.

You see, if I want to delete all the content from a category, it prevents me by telling me that there’s content in one of the categories’ sections. Why can it just ask me if I want to delete the section as well. Instead, it makes me go into the top menu to select the section and then delete that before I can remove the category. It’s just as irritating when the section contains content and I have to delete that too, requiring me to go back into the top menu, select all the content belonging to its parent section, and delete it. This seems like way too many steps to achieve such a simple goal.

A possible solution might be to prompt the user to delete all the content belonging under a category with a simple yes/no option set if an attempt is made to delete the parent category. That would reduce the number of steps significantly and made dumping old content and categories much easier for site administrators.