All of these options, while important on some level, waste valuable screen real-estate and confuse new users. These preferences should be removed from the main pages and buried in a link at the top of the site called "preferences". Ahh but you say - there are a ton of preferences - that would be too many links at the top! Read on:
I think I might have a way to solve this problem and make it easier to navigate for both novice and advanced users. I propose we unify all the "preferences" into one "tabbed" style web page and all the "Your ..." junk into another (I have no idea what you might call that - history?). I called it "tabbed" because my proposal works and feels like a windows tab control. A user would simply click on "Preferences" at the top of the site and be whisked away to an easy to explore & intuitive interface.
For an example of how I'd implement this, view a copy of what I did with Photographica's seller registration & management pages: http://www.coryking.com/ui_prop/ (this is a copy, so the links outside are probably busted or you just don't have permission to view them). In this case the "tab control" is a series of links underneath the title - "Registration | For Sale | ...". The current "tab" is non-linked and in bold. The remained are non bold and are links. When a tab is not relevant to the current user that page gets grayed out and the link is disabled. An example of this is when a user is not a registered seller (i.e. they have not entered their address & real name), they can't view the "For Sale", "Not For Sale" and "Sales Report". Thus those options are grayed out (see here: http://www.coryking.com/ui_prof_nfs/). When the enter the required information the tabs become active.
For scoop, I would bind all the preferences as well as the "user info" into one "tab control". The "Your..." would become another tab control. I'd love to add the subscription & advertising management to the preferences control as well, but I'm not as familiar with that code. The URL structure would be identical to what it is now. Each page would just feature this tab control.
Two "build menu" functions (one for prefs and one for history) would take the current page as well as a user ID and generate the HTML structure for the menu. The build menu function would do permissions checking (i.e. somebody other then the admin or the user is trying to view the ad setup for a given user) as well as dealing with what boxes would be grayed.
Why is this good? Because if you want, you can get rid of 8 or more lines of junk that currently clutter the website, and replace it with only two - "Your history" and "Your account" (or account preferences). If an admin wished, they could easily deep link into tab control and keep the user menu. On my site anyway, I'd love to get rid of that user menu all together and just move the two new links to the top & bottom of the page.
Suggestions please - I want to hear idea for naming, comments and questions before I work on this and submit a patch. I am going to implement this for photographica, but I really, really want to keep this general enough that all sites can use. I have wanted to give something to the scoop community for a while, but most of what I have done is far to site specific; this is not. Plus I hate having to edit all of scoops patches to work with my site so it would be nice if for once I did not :-)
