[drupal-support] AJAX and Drupal

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, Chris Johnson wrote:

> 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.

> 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.

This was just how I'd do it. Others might want to open the file, empty it,
and upload the empty file to their server.

> Further thoughts on the broader topic:

> We need to find a way to allow much more administrator customization
> without requiring shell access.

None of the various Drupal admin options currently really depends on 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.

We are always interested in people who want to do usability work for
Drupal.

> 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.

I had once suggested the same, but Dries didn't like it. Was some time
ago, so he might reconsider this.

>  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.

What we could do is to have variables that are only settable in
settings.php, ie

$conf['ajax'] = 1; // if 1 use Ajax

But for the current case I don't see this happening.

Cheers,
	Gerhard