Jeremy wrote <br><br>> I agree that titles, whether<br>
> explicitly specifed or whether pattern-generated, should be required<br>
> and should be unique.<br><br><br>Jeremy-<br><br>I must *strongly* disagree.<br><br>Forcing unique titles is a bad path, for a number of reasons, especially in import/export routines.<br><br>For sites that want to use Drupal as CMS and run external content, titles tend to repeat.
<br><br>Use case (in production):<br><br>We run a daily newspaper through XML/RPC import into Drupal. Each day, there are at least 3 articles that always have the same title (see, for example, 'Letters to the Editor' at
<a href="http://new.savannahnow.com/node/133628">http://new.savannahnow.com/node/133628</a>).<br><br>If you enforce unique title constraints, you break the publishing model.<br><br>If we want to use duplicate titles, we should be able to. It is not the place of the CMS to impose that rule on us.
<br><br>For newspapers (and other periodicals), readers (and writers, and editors) expect certain content to have the same title every day. That's how they find things. And, no, using taxonomies won't solve that problem.
<br><br>- Ken Rickard<br>agentrickard<br><br><br><br>> My importexportapi module, for example, treats the 'title' field as<br>> required and as unique, because it is the only field suitable for<br>> being an 'alternate key' for nid (
i.e. a reliable but more<br>> human-friendly identifier, that can be used instead of nid).This is<br>> just one more case where having guaranteed unique titles is very<br>> useful.