[drupal-support] AJAX and Drupal

[Chris Johnson]

Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, NSK wrote:


>>instead of just hacking the source in order to empty the js file?
> 
> 
> echo "" > misc/drupal.js can hardly be considered hacking.
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Gerhard


Many hosting services do not provide shell access.  Requiring shell commands 
to do an install or set an option is a hack in my humble opinion.


Further thoughts on the broader topic:

We need to find a way to allow much more administrator customization without 
requiring shell access.  Too often the reason for not adding admin option to 
configure something is the valid and good desire to keep the number of admin 
options to "manageable" size or the smallest size possible.  Perhaps what we 
really need to do is look at ways to make the admin options more manageable 
and understandable.  Much of that is human factors / interface usability work.

I would suggest that admin options be divided into the "usual" set of options 
and a "power user / config every possible setting" set of options.  Perhaps 
the latter merely sets lots of values for various variables, so that the 
person doing the changing is really required to know what they are doing -- 
the equivalent of editing some of the static variables kept in settings.php.

Yet another simpler possibility is to add many more settings to settings.php 
for these kinds of things.  Then all that is require of the admin is the 
ability to edit the settings.php file and upload it to his/her hosted site, 
something they must be able to do anyway to install Drupal.  No command line 
needed.

Then settings.php might have a line that says:

$ajax_subroutines = "misc/drupal.js";		// if blank, JS is disabled.


--
Chris Johnson