Making Module Administration More User Friendly (in 30 seconds or less)

For those of us with a bit more Drupal experience, it is easy to forget that most Drupal newcomers don't automatically know where to go to find a certain configuration screen or settings page.

And given that Drupal 7 changed the default paths to many notable administration pages, it's more important than ever to make it easy for Drupal newbies to get where they need to go after installing a module (especially if the module's README.txt file is not particularly up to date).

In Drupal 7, there's a simple way for any module maintainer to make life a little bit simpler for module users. And the best part is, this can be accomplished in about 30 seconds or less.

Drupal 7 allows a module to specify its main configuration page within its .info file. The format is very simple:

configure = admin/config/example
(where "admin/config/example" is the path to the page)


Once the module is enabled, a "Configure" link will appear in the "Operations" column on the "Modules" page (admin/modules).

So for the Private Message module (a module I contribute to regularly), it looks like this:

configure=admin/config/messaging/privatemsg

And here's the end result:

It's a very simple thing to do, but many contributed modules for Drupal 7 forget to do it.