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May 2005

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[drupal-devel] Results of the documentation usability survey and experiment
by Kieran Lal 10 May '05

10 May '05

Results of the survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB2248J7XSE9C Users of documentation: -69% site admins -46% site users Situation when using documentation: -Troubleshooting a problem- 54% -Administering a Drupal application -52% -Administering Drupal-49% -Learn about Drupal-48% Documentation needs -Drupal application documentation-71% -Drupal administration documentation -65% -An answer to your problem-58% Decision criteria for using the documentation again -Read the documentation-68% -Found answer to problem last time-59% Usability experiment: card sorting http://www.websort.net/display/?study=drupaldocumentation The first red cluster is the About Drupal handbook The first blue cluster is the Installation and upgrading handbook The next red cluster is the Configuration and customization handbook The last blue cluster is the Developing for Drupal handbook The results indicate that we can meet the diverse documentation needs with the handbooks we have selected. We will use the results to help design the subsections in the book so that they are easy to find. Actions by the docs team -Creating a documentation block which meets your situation, needs, and decision criteria when using the documentation. -Created handbooks and have begun transferring content. http:// drupal.org/handbook/v2 -Created configuration and customization handbook pages for 60 applications(modules) including core. http://drupal.org/handbook/config -Recruiting volunteers for an application documentation sprint to ensure basic documentation and links are available for 60 modules. See follow up email. Join the Docs team: http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-docs

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[drupal-devel] [task] Drupal Install System
by adrian 10 May '05

10 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/5496 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: base system Category: tasks Priority: normal Assigned to: adrian Reported by: adrian Updated by: adrian Status: patch Here is that overview of the install system i promised weeks ago : http://drupal.org/node/22472 This is the first phase. adrian Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 29, 2004 - 11:10 : adrian I am in the process of developing a new Install API for the drupal core, which will allow a completely web based install / set up process, as well as allow contributed modules to integrate more directly into this system. A more detailed description of the system is available in this thread. This task has been created to place each of the successive patches in the patch queue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 29, 2004 - 11:20 : adrian Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/install_api_first_level.patch (6.42 KB) Kjartan correctly identified one of the problems in creating a unified install system. There's a lot of code that gets run by simply including the core files (bootstrap.inc, database.inc, session.inc and common.inc). A lot of this code relies upon the database connection going off without a hitch, like for instance the current system variables, themes and session code. To work around this i created a new drupal_init() function, which needs to be called when you want the system to initialize. drupal_init has a 'db_init' argument, which allows you to bypass the loading of all the database related code with a simple flag. install.php needs to run drupal core, while ignoring any database connections .. until atleast the point where the configuration settings for the database are entered, and confirmed to work. There is a new function created called 'database_connected()' , which returns a boolean true only if the database both connected and the table was selected successfully. This patch does not have a suitable error message for index.php upon not being able to make a database connection ,but that message should very likely be discussed and finalized. In the next level of the patch I will introduce the major changes, or rather additions. I haven't modified any existing files beyond the ones in this patch (at this time). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 29, 2004 - 14:24 : Kjartan This patch has some serious flaws though. <?php include_once "includes/bootstrap.inc"; -drupal_page_header(); include_once "includes/common.inc"; ?> By removing the drupal_page_header() you break the whole point of bootstrap as the common.inc stuff is included when its not necessary. It needs some more thought. Maybe you should take the time to make a workflow of the current Drupal init process before modifying it. Also the naming of constants, I would prefer calling them DATABASE_ATTEMPT as it makes it easier to tell them appart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 9, 2004 - 22:18 : adrian I have reworked the patch into a very minimal set of requirements. To prevent the .inc files from running any code when you don't want them to , you 'define' a constant called 'DRUPAL_NO_INIT' before including bootstrap.inc. This relatively small patch is required for the install stuff to work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 9, 2004 - 22:22 : adrian Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal_no_init_flag.patch (3.88 KB) i'll even attach it this time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 9, 2004 - 22:48 : adrian Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/database_init_return.patch (1.96 KB) The following patch is a modification to the includes/database*.inc set of files, to make db_connect return a boolean value depending on wether the connection was successfully made. I have changed database.inc to die() upon connection error with the message "Database Connection Unsuccessful". Cleaning up that message and placing a help page might be a good idea from an user experience point of view. This patch is required for the install system, in that it needs to test wether it has made a successfull database connection before it allows you to actually install the schema. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 10, 2004 - 03:15 : adrian Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/install_system_alpha.tar.bz2 (11.59 KB) This is an alpha version of the new install API code. It is completely capable of installing the drupal core system without requiring any interaction with the database side. There are currently 5 configuration screens , but the API is sound for us to add / remove / change these screens as we need. In it's current state, it isn't capable of updating the base system, however the backend stubs exist, and have been tested. In the push to get the install process running smoothly i simply disabled the update interface. The previous 2 patches on this node need to be applied, but have been combined into install_system_alpha.patch which is included in this distribution. The rest of the files are new , and should not interfere with the drupal core at all. They are includes/install.inc ... the file that hosts the install api. install.php ... the front end script that initializes the install api (a total of 5 lines) install/system.install ... the install module for the core. It contains the bulk of code from update.php, and all the configuration information needed to successfully install the core. In the future , the install api will be able to easily install any contrib module through the modulename.install file that will hopefully become well supported. Note: I need to update the postgres compatibility in this .install file, and as such only mysql is fully tested now. I have posted some screenshots at my site ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 10, 2004 - 20:22 : adrian Unconed just pointed out there is a conflict with windows installations in that there can not be an 'INSTALL' file and an 'install' directory (which contains the system.install currently) He suggested that we rename the README and INSTALL files to README.txt and INSTALL.txt. I personally move that we store the .install files within the modules directory , as in the future installing a contributed module should be as simple as dropping the module directory (containing .install , .module and whichever external files) into modules/ , and then installing the module within drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2004 - 07:10 : moshe weitzman I played around with the patch, and successfully installed a new Drupal instance on the fitst try. Nice work, Adrian! I reviewed the code too, and found it quite Drupalish and satsfactory. Here are some notes from my install: - On the configuration file page, I selected from the radio button options a file which was not conf.php and thus did not exist. I strugged with the 'file is not writeable' error for a while until I realized that you expected me to create the file and then the installer would edit it ... in general, this page is a pretty complex introduction into drupal. I suggest simply assuming 'conf.php' here. I haven't thought about this much though. - Similar to above, I figured Drupal would create a database for me. Not so, I had to create it and then Drupal takes over. Some simple help text adddresses this point. - Use form_password() or similar when requesting a database password - The default $base_url was missing a slall for me. It said 'http://medrinstall' instead of 'http://me/drinstall' - After completing the DB install, there is no page telling you what to do next. A link to the home page is all thats needed IMO. -The site_name chosen during the install was not saved in the 'variable' table. - When you return to install.php some time later, you have no indication what a working site already exists. Not sure thats the right thing to do. Not a big deal though. P.S. Adrians suggestion to store the .install files in module specific subdirs under modules makes sense to me. Thus system.install would move to modules/system/system.install ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 13, 2004 - 06:04 : skip I had to set up a pMachine blog yesterday for a client. I have to say... it was the easiest install process I've ever gone through (CMS-wise). Very user friendly. Lots of feedback to the user. If you haven't seen it before, you should check it out for ideas. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 18, 2004 - 07:26 : adrian Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/install_phase2.tar.bz2 (12.96 KB) So I have spent far too much time over the last few weeks battling with this install system. My current results are in this here tarball. This time I am even less sure of it fully working in all cases, than last time. With this release I added extensive error checking to the install process, finished MOST of what is needed for the update process , but most importantly... it is a lot more secure than previously, and is specifically built to allow people to host their multiple drupal installs from just a single root. I have handled this by adding a global variable to the config file (allow_override_config) , which is checked by the install script before a new configuration file is made that would override the currently active one. There are three settings to this : 'no' , 'any' and 'auth'. I feel auth is generally the best option, as it requires anyone trying to override a working configuration file to enter the username and password for the site he is trying to override. Added checking also exists for the minimum requirements of running a drupal system (the tests probably need to be fleshed out), aswell as refusing to install a database dump into a db_url/db_prefix which seems to have a valid site installed. When a working configuration is detected on startup , the default action is to require the administrator user of the site to log in. This is for security reasons. The install script has lots of code that stops it from ever overwriting any config file that has already been created, but as I said .. it allows for the creation of a config file that will be parsed before the current valid install, but only with the express permission of that config. Config files have been moved to './conf/' , and the default config has been renamed to 'conf/default.php'. I have split install.inc into install.inc and install.module, as there was a lot of interface code specifically for the update/install sequence (and it is best available for reuse .. so i didnt wanna put it in install.php). This has an unrelated quirk for xtemplate .. I left it in the patch because for some reason I was unable to get a working default theme because xtemplate refused to populate the 'path' template variable. I also have an extensive 'gallery' of the new changes if you just want to see what it looks like. Directions for use : untar in a drupal cvs tree , and 'patch -p0 < install_alpha_2.patch' go to http://mysite/install.php ... previous configs in includes/ will be ignored for extra fun , create a hostname entry to sitea.siteb.sitec.sited.mysite , and watch the install script pick up the valid configs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 18, 2004 - 17:14 : TDobes Adrian, thanks for all your work on the install system... I'll check it out once I get home this evening. Just FYI, here's a link to the XTemplate bug [1] you mentioned. (It's a simple two-line patch.) [1] http://drupal.org/node/view/5858 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 20, 2004 - 22:29 : adrian taking out of patch queue. Still on my todo list, but I have to get some other things done first. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 27, 2004 - 17:25 : JonBob The install system should (will?) handle version numbers. Some related issues to examine: None of these are really duplicates of one another, so while I'd like to close them I can't. Consider this a reminder to do so if and when the install system addresses the problems. New 'version' system field and Drupal version [2] Module dependencies [3] Show drupal version to admins [4] Meta tag with drupal version [5] Version number [6] [2] http://drupal.org/node/view/5811 [3] http://drupal.org/node/view/8402 [4] http://drupal.org/node/view/2986 [5] http://drupal.org/node/view/2828 [6] http://drupal.org/node/view/8762 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:03 : publian It made it based on install_phase2. It makes it with drupal CVS as of 2005.03.14. The improvement point is as follows. 1) The installation query command execution read database/database.mysql or database/database.pgsql. 2) Two head bytes of $_SERVER 'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE' were seen, and the installation language was distinguished automatically. This sees the install.lang file in the languege folder. (funcution lt() like funcution t()) Making) 3)　In the installation process, the mother tongue can have been selected. (The import is done from the file in the translations folder. ) 4) Additionally, a detailed place was corrected. The bug moves though thinks many still. -- Drupal Japan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:10 : publian Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/install_phase3.tar.gz (134.72 KB) It is as for appending. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 26, 2005 - 10:11 : judah I was just about to start creating an install system for modules when someone mentioned you were already working on one. Here is my design specs, http://drupal.org/node/19427 I could not contact you via any other means so please advise what the current status is on this. Thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 31, 2005 - 01:13 : adrian Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/install_api_phase_1.tar.bz2 (21.49 KB) Attached is the first iteration of my new install system. To install : Extract tarball into a clean checkout, and apply the install_api_phase_1.patch file. This patch implements the following : Core install api. /(includes/install.inc)/ Modifications to drupal_load that disables a module that has an out of data schema. /(includes/bootstrap.inc)/ Does not allow modules to be enabled unless they have been installed, or updated and the allow for them to be installed and updated directly from admin/modules. /(modules/system.module)/ This patch does NOT : Install or update Drupal core, however it is possible to do so with the api (and I have done so before), significant changes to Drupal need to happen before it is practical to handle core with it. Description : This is the first phase of a four or five phase project, so it's not meant to solve the whole problem. I am writing a post for the Drupal forums at present detailing the progress with the install system, and directions I want to take it. To enable a module to be installable, you add an implementation of hook_info() to it , i.e. : <?php function buddylist_info($key) { $info['schema'] = 1; return $info[$key]; } ?> This tells the system that a schema version of 1 is required to operate this module. You then create a file called modulename.install (preferably in the same directory in the module, although it doesn't really matter. You then need to specify which schema version it implements by : <?php function buddylist_schema($key) { $info['version'] = 1; return $info[$key]; } ?> Although, in the current implementation this function is optional when you only have a single schema version (the default is 1). Then you implement your hook_install(). <?php function buddylist_install() { $query = " CREATE TABLE {buddylist} ( uid int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, buddy int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, timestamp int(11) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (uid, buddy) )"; db_query($query); db_query("ALTER TABLE {buddylist} ADD received tinyint(1) NOT NULL;"); } ?> This function would be called for any database type that has not specified it's own function. To add Postgres support, the function would be called buddylist_install_pgsql();. If the schema of your module ever changes, to allow for it to be updated, you proceed as follows : increment the 'schema' value in your hook_info() function. increment the 'version' value in your hook_schema function, within your modulename.install file. modify your schema as required, by changing it in the hook_install() function. provide an update script for users of the previous version. The following is an example of an update script. <?php function buddylist_update_1() { db_query("ALTER TABLE .... ..... "); } ?> These updates can also be database specific (ie: buddylist_update_1_pgsql() etc). When a module needs to be updated, it will execute each of the functions in order (exactly like one would in updates.inc currently.) I have included copies of the Trackback and Buddylist modules for testing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 31, 2005 - 03:26 : FactoryJoe(a)civicspacelabs.org No idea if this is of any use, but I thought it would be cool if there were feeds for each module: http://www.speirs.org/appcasting/ Drumm calls it RSS for RSS' sake. Perhaps, but it's worth considering. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 31, 2005 - 12:09 : adrian Yeah. I've been planning that from the start (before it had a fancy name), I'm currently planning to have it happen around phase four or five.

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[drupal-devel] [feature] Enable multiple block regions (not just "left" and "right" sidebars)
by nedjo 10 May '05

10 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/16216 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: block.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: paragkenia Updated by: nedjo Status: patch I am not opposed to the idea of changing the _block() hook to use callbacks (I have no opinion on it, not immediately grasping the need), but this seems quite distinct from the aim of enabling multiple and extensible regions. Why can't we just move ahead with the block generalization? I suggest: * quickly implement the proposed block region generalization, using only the two existing regions (i.e., implementing them in core themes) * later worry about: - adding further regions (the details of which are best done by those primarily responsible for the particular themes) - possible changes to the _block() hook. Wouldn't this make sense? Or am I missing some pressing reason for which the block generalization has to wait? nedjo Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 26, 2005 - 06:27 : paragkenia I read the comparision discussion between *Drupal* and *Mambo*. In several messages it was outlined that Drupal can place blocks only in right and left and not flexible to put them on anywhere where one want. It will be great if this can be changed in upcoming versions. I am no pro at PHP, so don't know how much time this task will take, but I think it is very important. parag ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 14, 2005 - 21:44 : nedjo This issue was apparently partially addressed in issue http://drupal.org/node/19694 [1]. [1] http://drupal.org/node/19694 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 16, 2005 - 20:24 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions.patch (8.17 KB) This much-requested functionality - to have the ability to place blocks in more than the two predefined regions - was partially addressed in issue http://drupal.org/node/19694. [2]. But "blocks" are still limited to the "left" and "right" sidebars (hard-coded in block.module). This patch is a first step designed to enable multiple (eventually, admin-definable) regions for blocks. I've moved the existing "left" and "right" block regions to a 'region' table (with ids of 0 and 1, as currently used in themes). Then all references to the regions are drawn dynamically from the table. This way, if further records are added, they will appear in the list of available regions for block placement. Doing this actually reduces some duplicated code, since it's no longer necessary to repeat code blocks for each of "left" and "right". As it stands, the patch doesn't add any new functionality--but I don't think it breaks anything either. New functionality would need (a) new regions defined, and (b) changes to themes. A simple first step might be, e.g., to add a "footer" region and then add a call in the footer generation to append any blocks assigned to the footer region there. I'm setting this to patch, but I'm aware that it needs some discussion and refining before it'll be ready to apply. [2] http://drupal.org/node/19694. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 16, 2005 - 21:05 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block_regions.png (5.65 KB) Here's a screenshot showing the block admin page, with drop-downs for region placement (the options are dynamically generated based on defined regions). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 16, 2005 - 22:57 : adrian The biggest problem with this is that you can have multiple themes, and each of these themes can have different regions available. Also, the method of defining which regions are available needs to be standardised. Some of the work that me and Vlado are working on for the install system would go towards solving that problem (ie: meta information for modules, themes and styles). This has been discussed to death, but the general consensus has been that we _want_ to do this, but we need to solve a few other problems properly first, the most pertinent being the interface issue. Chris (factoryjoe) recently did a whole mess of workflows for something related to this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 00:09 : syscrusher The first paragraph of adrian [3]'s post is a point that occurred to me also, as I read this thread. One suggestion would be to separate the definition and configuration of blocks, on one hand, from the placement of those blocks, on the other hand. In other words, Drupal core provides a mechanism defining what blocks exist, which of these are on by default or off by default and user-selectable vs. which are forced on for all users, and the configuration (if applicable) of specialized blocks defined by particular modules. Each theme provides a standard hook function that returns an array of region names and help/description text, e.g., array('left'=>t('This vertical region is left of the main content area'), 'right'=>t('This vertical region is right of the main content area'), 'footer'=>t('The footer is below the left, right, and main content areas of the page')). The theme part of Drupal core (i.e., theme.module itself, not the individual themes) provides a standard UI that is displayed within config of *each theme* (but is one physical code base within theme.module) that allows the administrator to map blocks defined by Drupal core into regions defined by the theme, and storing that mapping as an theme-to-block_ID-to-region_ID (with weight) table in the database. From there, the actual page rendering is similar to what's being done now, but there is more of it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the key to solving this problem is breaking it along its degrees of orthogonality, and there are three -- two in Drupal core and one in the individual theme. Scott [3] http://drupal.org//user/1517 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 03:14 : Dries Scott, is right. The theme should export its available regions. Then the administrator's task is to assign blocks to regions (not to setup regions). A theme could have configurable regions, but that internal to the theme. To me, the real challenge is the UI and the interaction design. Configuring blocks could easily become a real pain (while most themes continue to use 'left' and 'right'.) Of course, we can implement all the functionality, default everything to 'left' and 'right', and worry about the UI later. This should be fairly straightforward to implement and nedjo's patch looks like a first step in the right direction. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 17:09 : nedjo I agree with the suggested approach of themes registering their regions. I'd see this happening when a particular theme is activiated (or upgraded). Regions would be an array of names (e.g., 'left', 'right', 'footer'). New records would be created in the region table only for region names not previously registered. Some areas I'm not clear on, or that need further work: Table naming Should a new table be 'region' or 'regions' (I've used 'region')? I don't see a convention among existing table names, some of which are singular and others plural. Default values I've kept the existing '0' and '1' ids for regions (left and right, respectively), for backward compatibility. But this means we can't use autoincrement for the region id (rid), since autoincrements seem to begin with 1. Likely we should change to autogenerated ids. Initial records Using the INSERT INTO statements as I've done for the initial region entries is probably counterproductive, since sooner or later they'll have to be dynamically generated. I was hoping this could be a preliminary patch, with the main work coming later, but likely we need to solve region registration by themes before this patch is applied. I don't have a good idea of how region registration by themes would be implemented (a hook on theme activation?), and invite suggestions or implementations. Theme system changes Besides region registration, the other change I'm seeing that would be needed in the theme system is loading blocks by region name, rather than region id. This is because the ids currently used ('0' and '1') in theory might be diffferent on a particular install. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 17:18 : syscrusher Instead of having themes "register" their regions, why not just add a theme API hook called them_regions() that returns an associative array of $region_name=>t($region_helptext)? This would be in keeping with other similar API functions, such as those that return what permissions apply to a module or what node types are defined by a module. Most themes are going to define only a small number of regions (two being the typical case now, but I could see five or six in a complex theme), so returning a constant array will be faster than querying SQL to obtain an array of rows. There could be (optionally, at the discretion of whoever builds this thing) another API hook like theme_region_properties($region_name) that returns an associative array with detailed info for a given region, such as extended help text with recommended usage instructions for the region. Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 17:19 : syscrusher s/them_regions/theme_regions/g ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 18:47 : adrian Because. The most common 'theme' is a phptemplate theme. And there needs to be a generic method for specifying the regions available, in a non hook_function format.. Themes get their names from the directory in which they are contained.. when copying the theme to another directory, there must be _no_ modifications necessary to allow normal usage. This is one of the tenets of the new template system I designed. You would need a standard way to define meta-information for themes, that does not need to be modified when copied to a new directory. We are working on this in the install system work, as you need a way external of Drupal to define the module dependencies and some other things. My approach would be to add a theme.dsc text file to the directory, which would allow you to specify meta-information. For instance : ---- regions: left, right, footer, center, mountie author: Johnny McAngstyPants ---- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 22:00 : syscrusher Adrian wrote: " Themes get their names from the directory in which they are contained.. when copying the theme to another directory, there must be _no_ modifications necessary to allow normal usage. This is one of the tenets of the new template system I designed. " A very good point. But region names don't have to be unique across different themes, so my hook function wouldn't have to be modified. The suggestion I made for the mapping metadata was three factors: theme ID or name, region ID or name, and block ID (plus one non-key weight value to order the blocks within a region, but this is not relevant here). I'm not familiar enough with PHP template to be able to respond to your comments on that one, so if you say it's not feasible to work with my schema, then I'll take your word for it. :-) Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 22:03 : syscrusher Oh, wait.....I see now what you mean! It's not the output of the function that is the problem, but the *name* of the function. Never mind. I concede your point. Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 03:44 : Jaza I'm probably jumping ahead a bit here... but something that this patch will have to eventually account for, is how to allow regions to be defined as inline. Allowing a theme to define a region's position as being anywhere on the edge of the page (i.e. top, left, right, bottom, corners, etc) is relatively easy. But what about having a region that's in the middle of a node's body, or somewhere else that's not the edge of the page? What I'm thinking of, is eventually allowing the custom region system to integrate with the CCK. Like I said, I admit that I'm jumping ahead into the future - the CCK still has a long way to go before it's ready. But ultimately, it would be cool if a theme could define a region as being after, say, the "rating" field in nodes of type "movie review". This would make the region (and the blocks in it) truly inline and in context with the actual content of the node. This would be a huge step forward compared to the current block system, which doesn't allow you to mix the presentation of blocks and nodes at all. In Drupal ATM, blocks and "the rest of the page" are totally separate, and really you have no choice but to display them as such. The result of this is that information in blocks that really should be displayed as part of a node, gets literally "pushed to the side", and always seems secondary to the actual content. Often the block has content that is just as important as the content of the node itself. Another option (of less merit, IMO - because of the extra maintenance work, and lack of enforced consistency) would be to have a region filter. You could then choose where to place an inline region on a per-node basis, by entering text such as [region:2] (example based on image_filter syntax) into the node body. Anyway, just thought I'd throw that idea into the open. I don't expect it will be implemented any time soon, but it's something to think about. Jeremy ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 04:54 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png (1.29 KB) Imo the 'regions' are more than you guys name here.. FOr example I attached 2 screens which only shows you the regions.. What I think is that it should always be possible to have free names for the regions. No matter if i call - the region where my content appears in - 'content' or 'site items'.. See attached screens.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 04:56 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-2.png (1.39 KB) And the second... See these links: - http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png - http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-2.png ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 11:22 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions2.patch (13.39 KB) Here's a revised patch implementing some of the ideas so far. I've used the theme engine - rather than individual themes - to generate the list of available regions. I know this isn't ideal, but e.g. for xtemplate it's at present the only option--no logic is possible in the individual theme. region is changed to a varchar field from the current tinyint. I've roughed in several regions--really just for demo purposes. More thought and work would be needed to refine them (e.g., styling, etc.). But this maybe moves the conversation forward. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:26 : Dries This patch enables different regions to be used. That is a good thing. The next question is: should we take into account that different themes could assign blocks to different regions? Lots of problems would be solved if (i) there could only be one active theme on a website or (ii) if all themes would have a common set of regions. (This "let users select their own theme"-thing is a left-over from the early days, except for WAP stuff maybe.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:37 : killes(a)www.drop.org Giving up multiple theme support would be a great thing. People could still select from multiple style sheets. WAP shoud not be a user preference setting, but automatically detected and redirected to a special site with a WAP theme. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:48 : adrian You would then lose the ability to make a special front page theme for use with the sections module, for instance. Also, currently styles exist in the same namespace as themes, and we would have to make more a distinction of styles vs templates (or themes), but I do think this could help simplify things. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 12:54 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions3.patch (15.69 KB) The main issue raised, if I'm understanding well: if a theme or theme engine is present that offers regions other than those available in the default theme, any blocks assigned to those regions will be invisible to most users. Here's a revised patch addressing the concern. I've added a test for each region to see whether it's also available in the current default theme. (Actually, I'm realizing as I write this, I've used the theme engine--so it would need to be updated to test first if an engine is being used.) In any case, any regions not available by default are starred, and a message text appears (only if necessary). If there's support for the approach, I'd be happy to finish the patch. Remaining work: * extend to work with non-engine themes * finalize base set of regions to implement * implement common region set in all core themes (for now I've only done xtemplate) * work on CSS display (how blocks in each region should look) This last point I'm not too confident on and would look for help/suggestions. Screenshot to come. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 12:56 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block_regions_message.png (12.34 KB) Screenshot showing starring of non-default regions plus message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 13:19 : killes(a)www.drop.org I like that approach. +1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 13:23 : resmini My two cents. If this has to be done (and it should), better get rid of spatial definitions for areas such as left, right, top, bottom, etc. Use semantic names related to content and let the theme take care of their positioning interely. Also note that there in an ongoing debate in IA trying to build up a standard naming convention for page regions in a way that is semantically (and logically) correct. Just for the sake of it, you can check http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name.html http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name_pt2.html with follow-ups, including Eric Meyer's. There are more substantial contributes in the AIfIA web site, but I can't seem to find them now. I'll post a link or an abstract if I manage to. -- vector at exea dot it ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 14:15 : nedjo Good points, useful references. The default regions I'm thinking of are: 'banner' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), 'footer' => t('footer') Perhaps "body" would be better as "content"? It would be easy enough to add in more regions, e.g., within the content (after title, after help, etc.) One issue is that many of these regions will already have rendered content. Should the blocks come before or after that other content? I've assumed after for banner and footer, while giving both options in body. In any case, refinements or suggestions would be great. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 14:56 : resmini Well, 'banner' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), 'footer' => t('footer') The classic (as far as classic goes for something Web related) scheme comprises 5 spatial regions, much like stefan's http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png with a left area mirroring the one called 'blocks'. Call them top, left, center, right, bottom. Variants usually exclude one or more of these, layout-wise. If we talk content (semantic) instead, things get a bit more complicated, as these spatial regions normally include more than one content-area. The top, for example, could include ad banners and the site's header, or the main menu. But these merge seamlessly with CSS definitions, which are definitely something that should get properly standardized (most of the errors / inconsistencies I'm encountering with Drupal today are related to this), but this is out of scope in this thread. What I somewhat object to the definitions above is that it mixes the two approaches. 'banner' is not spatial, is content, as it is the distinction between body top and bottom. If 'banner' goes there, it is 'top', whatever that might be. I designed a couple of web sites which had headers/logos/banners at the bottom of the page, and I'm not exactly the wildest designer you'll probably meet. And if we include body_top and _bottom, we should also add 'navigation', or 'menu' and some other content-related semantic region (impressum, or company_data, or whatever). I suggest that either we go along 'top' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'center' => t('body'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'bottom' => t('footer') or we dedicate some time to detailing what could possibly fit there semantically, which is perfectly possible without limiting design freedom or whatever, since the vocabulary is not infinite, but not something you do out of the blue. Please note that I understand t('something') to be an example, since such a layout only defines regions on the page, not semantic regions. My main content could fit nicely in the bottom region. As for the names for the regions, they are not important, as much as they are coherent and enforced. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 17:16 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions-final.png (2.39 KB) Maybe something like this??? But, I have to say that I _really_ liked the solution to split the 'content'-region into the 'content' and 'beneath content'.. I love that! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 18:20 : resmini Stefan, yes. That's basically what you can build if you stick with spatial, and this layout can generate quite an amount of (sane) layout variations even if you interpret it strictly (suppose a default) as <div id="header"> </div> <div id="left-bar"> </div> <div id="content"> </div> <div id="right-bar"> </div> <div id="footer"> </div> What you can do with this is left basically to the theme designers and their use of CSS, CSS-P or tables (brrr), but this could be an easy and proper way to identify macro-regions in which more accurate positioning happens at a more specific level. I'm all in favour of subsequent identification of sub-areas (top and bottom in body), but I don't think it would be a good idea to mix the different approaches I mentioned in my previous post. A site with lots of things going on or which is not just blogging surely has the need to use its content area in a wiser manner than just putting there 'content', the number of modules doing precisely this is more than proof, but that falls more in a 'Drupal definitive guide to semantics', in which CSS selectors are used or suggested strategically for such a scope. >From this point of view and for the sake of this thread, any unique area / div (#name) could (should?) be a target for blocks, and this in my opinion (*) would be the perfect solution, but I do not know if and how this is even remotely possible in the current Drupal. (*) It's quite late, local time, and it was a looong working day. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 18:38 : resmini Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions-final-variation.png (1.9 KB) Just to be clear, I add a variation of stefan's scheme that shows how this is *not* by any means positional, but spatial, or better relational. Use your CSS imagination to take out regions, reduce them to empty containers, enlarge them, make them taller, shorter, whatever. 5 regions, do what you like. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 18:44 : resmini Sorry, I forgot. And this is also why I'm not too keen on calling anything 'content'. If I enlarge my right region enough, why not put my content there? Shouldn't this be a theme-level concern? It's nothing serious, but if my center area is called 'center' (or something similar and more sexy), I won't confuse anybody. This is left, center, right: do with them what you prefer. Content in the bottom? Show me. If I call something 'content', I'm more than suggesting that content goes there, and only there. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 04:17 : stefan nagtegaal Resmini, maybe it is only me but I think that you are making a mistake in your way of thinking.. I get the feeling that you're mixing the 'regions' and 'divs'.. the 'regioins' should have meaningfull sentences, but the divs shouldn'thave.. As an example: $region_name => $content_body here we go: 'header' => $logo 'left sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'left') 'right sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'right') 'content' => $content 'footer' => $footer. So, $region_name does not have to be equal to the id or class of the divs.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 05:27 : resmini Stefan, >So, $region_name does not have to be equal to the id or class of the divs.. Yes, absolutely. I probably didn't make myself very clear: what I'm trying to point out is that in 'header' => $logo 'left sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'left') 'right sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'right') 'content' => $content 'footer' => $footer. there is no reason at all to call 'content' the region that holds $content. nedjo asked in #24 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), if /Perhaps "body" would be better as "content"?/ and all my reasoning is simply that no, that is not content, or it shouldn't be (or better: it may happen that main content is elsewhere). As a matter of fact, even the connotation 'sidebar' doesn't fit very well logically. To make it short: Today's method works, but has limits. Mambo, which paragkenia quotes at the beginning, handles more 'user regions' but in pure Mambo style conventions are so loose that they are hardly useful. If we define regions, as in nedjo's example, in my opinion these regions shouldn't imply informational layouting, only relational positioning (that is, where they stay in the browser viewport). I know it may look like overdesigning, but Drupal constantly enforces conventions and coding guidelines everywhere: this is one of the best aspects of the project and I think it should carry to the layout. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 05:32 : stefan nagtegaal While I think that 'body_*' is not as self explaining as 'content_*' I vote for using 'content_*'.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2005 - 13:48 : chx Let's get back to the code. If my understanding is correct the big discussion is about how to name potiental rectangular areas _after_ this is commited. So, first get this committed. What's need to make that happen? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2005 - 14:56 : chx I spoke with Moshe, Steven, JonBob and the result is: keys shall be numbers, and themes shall define the values. We will make region zero and one required. There will be a define('REGION_CONTENT', 0) and a define('REGION_SIDEBAR', 1); so you can have readable code still. Either wait for me to code it or feel to do it yourself, just drop me a mail via the contact form if you are doing it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 27, 2005 - 12:14 : nedjo Károly, it's great if you're willing to take on finishing this. I tried to summarize remaining work in update 20, above [4]. The numerical keys look fine to me. In terms of an initial default set of regions, one quirk is this: for now, so far as I can see (and assuming the approach I sketched in), available regions can be defined only in (a) theme engines and (b) individual themes that don't use an engine. So, for instance, an individual xtemplate based theme can't define its own custom regions; they need to be defined in the theme engine. (Unless and until the whole theme system should switch to the sort of configuration file adrian suggested above [5].) Which is to say that, under this approach, we'll be defining a set of regions for each engine, and then all themes using that engine should try to implement those regions. (Otherwise, if a site admin selects a region defined in the engine but not implemented in the default theme, the content won't appear.) Please let me know if there's anything in what I've done that isn't clear, or if you want to pass some or all of this back. Thanks! [4] http://www.drupal.org/node/16216#comment-27398 [5] http://www.drupal.org/node/16216#comment-27052 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 16:36 : chx I had a "short" discussion with the UI team leader ie. Ber Kessels. The outcoming is that we will change hook_block so that it uses callbacks a bit like menu system. Here's an example: <?php function module_block() { $items = array(); $items['module_header'] = array('callback' => 'mymodule_page', 'weight' => -50, 'region' => 'content' , 'cache' => TRUE, 'pages' => "node/*\n<front>"); return $items; } ?> Please note that we are allowing caching the themed output of each block independently. The theme system will execute hook_block as it does now and it'll execute the callbacks defined in module_block as well. Of course if the callback is cacheable and in the cache, it'll print it from cache. If it's themeable and not in the cache, it'll cache it before printing. Pages contains a string (could be PHP code!) which can be overriden in the block configuration screen. Callbacks defined in hook_menu will have lot less functionality after this, they will be used for non-themed pages mainly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 16:45 : chx More explanation is requested for the example. module_header is the unqiue name of the block. pages define on which pages the block is visible. ('pages' in the block configuration screen.) Maybe I'll implement 'visibility' from the same screen as well. callback, weight are well known Drupal terms. cache is a boolean which defines whether given output is cacheable or not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 16:47 : chx Ber, Dries, do not kill me! Ber chaired the usability meeting in Antwerp, that's all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 16:52 : Bèr Kessels Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/more_regions_principle.png (123.29 KB) attached is a schematic which might clarify this a little. And I would also like to comment on me being the UI leader: I do not consider myself any leader, no ofeence, though. Just to clarify that.

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[drupal-devel] [bug] Put revisions in their own table
by Dries 09 May '05

09 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/7582 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: node system Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: killes(a)www.drop.org Reported by: killes(a)www.drop.org Updated by: Dries Status: patch The time required to generate my main page went from 902 ms (before upgrade) to 2139 ms (after upgrade). The time required to generate a forum listing (?q=forum/x) went from 1872 ms (before upgrade) to 2874 ms (after upgrade). Maybe this is because my database is not consistent as the result of the upgrade errors (yet I don't see any errors on the pages I benchmarked). Dries Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 18:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Currently all node revisions are stored in a serialized field in node.table and retrieved for _each_ page view although they are rarely needed. However, we have agreed that serializing data is bad and that we should try to keep the memory foot print pf Drupal small. Therefore I propose to create a separate revisions table which would be in principle identical to the node table, only that it could have several old copies of the same node. Extra data added by other modules could be added in a serialized field unless we find a better solution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:06 : jhriggs I too think the serialized approach is less than desirable, but here's an alternative. This would likely take some considerable rework in core and contrib, but the following is how we handle similar types of situations in our databases at work. It is more elegant that a separate table, and avoids the (almost exact) duplication of a table. Instead of separate tables, keep all revisions of nodes in the node table as follows: * add field: active (0/1 or Y/N) * add field: revision * every revision of a node is stored in the node table; however, only one revision can be active at any given time * nid can no longer be unique -- primary/unique key becomes (nid, active) * any time a node is loaded, updated (without revision), etc., the active version is used. Thoughts? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org I am not opposed to your scheme, but I want to stress the following: * Duplicating a table's structure is not bad (IMHO) as long as the content is different. * having two tables will allow us to have a rather small node table. This is (maybe) a performance gain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 20:37 : jhriggs I don't necessarily think that duplicating a table's structure is _bad_. It just seems to be wasteful and a pain to maintain. (Every change to the node table is made twice...easy to do, but also easy to miss perhaps.) As for performance, as long as nid and the active indicator are indexed, there shouldn't be any performance loss. Also, archiving an old version when making a new revision will be much simpler: just change the active indicator rather than copying an entire node to another table (and ensuring everything gets copied...again a potential maintainance issue). To be honest, I would just like to see the serialized data go away, regarless of what approach is taken. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:49 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_07-30-2004.p… (10.47 KB) I'm interested in using Drupal for a large scale wiki-type project. In order to do this, I need revisions to be in their own table. Attached is a patch to do just that. Most of the changes are pretty self explanatory. Spreading out node data across two tables meant that I had to add database functions to do locking/transactions. Without this, race conditions in which the database becomes corrupted are possible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:54 : Nick Nassar Oh yeah... The patch is a diff against Drupal CVS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 02:00 : Anonymous Gerhard speaking. Nick, thanks a lot for your nice patch! It saves me a great deal of labour. I looked through it and immediately liked it. You not only put the old revisions into a new table but also the current one. Do you have an estimate how much more expensive the additional join is? Besides a few minor coding style issues I found a major one: Just a few hours before you uploaded your patch JonBob's node access patch hit core. That means your patch won't apply anymore as all the queries you change have been changed. Can I bug you to update your patch? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 03:11 : Anonymous Also I think that your upgrade path loses existing revisions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 04:39 : drumm I think this is the proper way to do things. No columns are duplicated, there is no serialized data, and only the fields that are logically revised are stored. Nothing jumped out at me as a way to have my node modules be able to keep a table of revisions of additional fields. I'm guessing this could be done within the confines of _insert and _update. Assuming the upgrade path works and modules can extend it I give it a +1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 16:40 : Nick Nassar It figures that just as I finish a big patch, another patch comes along and breaks it. Oh well, it should be a pretty easy to fix. I'll work on it. Fixing the upgrade path to keep revisions should be fairly painless. I found another issue that needs to be fixed before this patch gets merged. There format of a node needs to be stored for each revision. Otherwise, for modules that store a format for the nodes, such as page and book, if you write one revision in PHP and the next in HTML, the PHP revision will be displayed as HTML. This is part of a larger issue of how node modules should store revisions of additional fields. I think each module that wants to do this should create another table with (nid, revid) as the primary key. Just as when they want to add fields to a node they create another table with nid as the primary key. As far as performance goes, for sites that make heavy use of revisions, an extra join on primary keys is going to be a lot faster than grabbing all of the revisions from that database everytime. We would need to run benchmarks to determine is the overall difference in speed is for an average site is a gain or a loss. I'm guessing it's very minor either way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 15:55 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_08-23-2004.p… (10.92 KB) Here's an updated patch against CVS that puts revisions in their own table, provides an upgrade path, and fixes the format related bugs in the last patch. Hopefully, this can make it into CVS as soon as the freeze is over. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 16:10 : moshe weitzman Interesting patch ... drumm's question is still outstanding. how do modules store revisions of their fields? Are they expected to manage this on their own? Thats not how it works today. As an aside, i am seeing profile_ fields in my node.revisions column. One could argue that those need not be saved. They pertain to the node author, not to the node itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 18:14 : Nick Nassar Having modules be responsible for storing revisions of their own fields is a side-effect of storing revision data in tables. There's really no way around it. However, revisions generally don't make sense for node types that don't have PHP/HTML content, such as polls. I think it's going to be a pretty rare scenario for a new node type to want another field to change per-revision, so it's a pretty good trade-off. Storing fields that shouldn't be part of revisions, such as the profile_ fields, is a side-effect of storing revisions as serialized objects. Applying this patch will free up that wasted space. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 19:20 : Anonymous There should be a hook that let's the module choose whether it supports history. This way a module author can prevent the user from doing something that may break his module or just cause undefined behavior. If the module doesn't support history then don't let the user/admin choose to add history to nodes of that type. Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 21:23 : Nick Nassar I agree, there should be an API change to make specifying support for revisions easier. In the interests of keeping patches small and keeping to one change per patch, I think the API change should be a separate issue. A sort of ad-hoc API to decide whether or not a module supports revisions by default already exists. Instead of having a hook, modules set the default value of the "Create new revision" field in the edit form. The admin can change this option in admin/node/configure/defaults. This patch doesn't change that. Revisions are broken for node types that have their own database structure, like polls, even when storing them as serialized objects. This patch doesn't change that, either. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 26, 2004 - 04:35 : moshe weitzman I'm guessing that someone is going to have to demonstrate that this patch performs as well as current drupal before it gets comitted. i think this patch is a few benchmarks from being comitted. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:04 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 15, 2004 - 07:05 : elias1884 please overthink the revision system default workflow as well. don't look at the revision system as an isolated system but as a part of the whole workflow system! if you combine revisions with the moderation queue the most logic default workflow would be like that: auth user creates node (revision #0) admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) => node publicly available auth user finds typo and changes node (revision #1, status = 0, moderation = 1) ------- what happens at that point at the moment is, that the node is not accessible anymore at all until the new revision is approved by admin. of course the new revision should not go online until reviewed and approved, this is absolutely correct, but there is no reason to not take the old revision offline, since it was already approved and should therefore be online until the new revision is approved. it is not practical if a node disappears only because the author corrected a typo. ------- admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) eventhough I first thought a plain boolean active field would not be capable of providing that functionality if finally came to the conclusion, that it can. The only thing to do is to not set that bit, when a new revision is created, but when it is approved (in case moderation is activated under default workflow). Every revision should have its own moderation, status and active field and on approval they are set like this (status=1, moderation=0, active=Y). When you wanna rollback to an old revision, you can chose between all revisions that already have the moderation bit set back to 0 again and the published to 1. There should be an extra permission for rollback! another concern that I have about the default workflow is, that users can't see the content, they have just created, when moderation is enabled. Eventhough, there is a big fat "submission accepted" presented after submissions, unexperienced users tend to question the information those stupid tincans give them, if they can't find their content afterwards. Many users are really lazy bastards and they don't even read the status messages. The best feedback about whether his story was submitted successfully or not of course is, if he can find the story somewhere on the site, maybe with a status message on top of it, mentioning, that the content is currently not publicly available since it has not been approved yet. there should be a my content section under my account, like somebody is trying to do with the workspace module I guess. so my suggestion is to make (status=0, moderation=1) still available for the creator under a my content section somewhere! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 24, 2004 - 06:21 : Nick Nassar I agree. The current workflow for moderation queues and revisions needs to change, but this patch isn't the place for it. The patch is already too big, and it only does the backend stuff. Instead of adding more to this patch and making it take even longer to get into core, would you mind creating a new issue for your UI suggestions, so the those changes can be added as a separate patch? Thanks, Nick ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 14:26 : Dries This patch is _much_ needed so I'd love to see someone revive it. In order for this patch to be accepted, the following needs to be done: Update this patch to CVS HEAD. Rename revid to vid. Rename node_rev to node_revisions. Rename node_rev.changed to node_revisions.timestamp. Rename $rnode to $revision. Fix the coding style to match Drupal's: proper spacing, single quotes where possible, proper variable names. Benchmark this patch with a large database with enough revisions. I'd be happy to benchmark this on my local copy of the drupal.org database. The book.log field should probably move to the node_revisions table. This can be done in a separate patch. Investigate whether transactions are well-supported. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 02:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004-r… (11.02 KB) I've worked a bit on the patch (coding style issues as mentioned by Dries). One thing I noticed is that the patch uses REPLACE. IIRC this needs to be chagned to "UPDATE, if fail INSERT" for pgsql compatibility. Nick, are you still interested in working on that patch? I'd like to know how it works on your site and work on getting it into core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 14:33 : Dries Gerhard: your patch does not apply. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 19:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org Yes, I know, that was the same version as I mailed to you earlier. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 23:02 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions.patch (52.96 KB) Ok, upüdated the patch to cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 10:58 : Dries Some more comments: db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() do not belong in database.inc, but in database.mysql.inc and database.pgsql.inc respectively. The node module calls node_revisionsision_list() which is not defined. (Fxed that on my local copy.) Do db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() deprecate Jeremy's table locking patch? The upgrade path assigns the wrong user ID to each revision. The upgrade path assigns the wrong date to each revision (that or a node's revision page shows the wrong usernames/dates). The coding style needs a bit of work, but we can worry about that later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:34 : Nick Nassar If you need any help getting those things fixed, just let me know. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:50 : Nick Nassar How this relates to Jeremy's node locking patch: There was lots of discussion, and node locking was decided against because from an end user point of view you never want a node to be locked. He's now advocating for a much simpler patch that warns users if their changes will overwrite someone elses. That patch still has a race condition, which might be fixed using db_begin_transaction(). http://drupal.org/node/6025 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 00:26 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_0.patch (55.96 KB) Here is an updated patch that tries to address Dries concerns. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 10:32 : Dries Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions-bug.png (76.06 KB) It didn't fix the aforementioned bugs. See attached screenshot. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 6, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_1.patch (51.77 KB) Ok, here is a new version. Dries and myself worked hart at it, so please have a look. what is still missing - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 23:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_2.patch (49.49 KB) Here is an updated patch. We discussed to keep the current title in node module and also in the revisiosn table. This is content duplication but will save many joins as many queries only need the title of a node. Discussion is welcome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 01:33 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_3.patch (29.93 KB) I've implemented the aforementioned solution. This makes the patch much smaller. The patch now also removes taxonomy_node_has_term() which wasn't used anywhere. I'd really apprciate if some people could test drive the patch. It will be another huge improvement for 4.6. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 02:05 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_4.patch (30 KB) Another revision. Steven didn't like my literal $node->vid in queries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 03:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. These issues are still open, btw. Especially the first one needs to be tackled. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 25, 2005 - 22:11 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_5.patch (51.13 KB) Here is a patch that has the database tables updated for forum, book, and page module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_6.patch (49.18 KB) Yet another update to keep it working with head. The patch now also removes the table definitons for the page table. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_7.patch (55.69 KB) Sorry, that was the old version, this is the right one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 21:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_8.patch (55.71 KB) Updated once more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 22:52 : Dries Anyone to help review/test this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 23:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_9.patch (49.29 KB) Updated again, the update functions occurred twice. Thanks Bart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Don't know if the db I am using is corrupted or what. I still do have some didficulties. The latest patch is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_10.patch (49.67 KB) I am probably slowly going mad ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 03:54 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_11.patch (48.95 KB) The update issue still needs investigating. This patch is updated for cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 22:20 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_12.patch (49.83 KB) Ok, here is a new version. I've solved my troubles with book.module. There are still some issues with forum module. Possibly due to inconsistent database. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 23:31 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_13.patch (49.83 KB) Turns out the drupal.org database had indeed some quirks. Please run this query in your oldest db and tell me the result: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; If you get a non-zero result we might need to add another security update. The patch could use still more testing, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 03:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_14.patch (49 KB) Ok, we are getting somewhere. At a first glance the update is working. There is a problem remaining: the revisions tab will be shown whether the node has revisions or not. Not sure we can/need to fix this. People with a drupal.org account can log in at http://killes.drupaldevs.org/revision/ and poke around. Your permissions will be the same as on drupal.org. Feel free to vreak everything but don't forget to file complaints here. (Note: this is only a pruned version of the drupal.org database with all project nodes and nodes with nids > 7000 dropped). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 06:19 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_15.patch (52.39 KB) There was some error in node_save and also the patches to the database.inc files got lost... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:07 : robertDouglass Submitting book pages doesn't work on your test site. It puts the entire content of the preview inside the body textarea. I wrote a sentence in the body and the log, and pressing preview put several lines of HTML containing both sentences in the body textarea on the preview page, plus the book page wouldn't submit. -R ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:50 : Junyor 0 results here. I started using Drupal with version 4.4, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 01:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Junyor: Thanks, that's a good sign. Maybe somebody else has an older db to try. @robertDouglass: The first effect you describe is due to drupaldevs running on PHP 5. I am unsure why the second thing does not work. In node_save() the node object has a nid although there is none in the form. Very strange. I've enabled display of db queries on the testsite. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 21:17 : dmjossel No results here on the query: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; On a database that was put in place prior to Drupal 4 and is now running on 4.5.2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 22:44 : killes(a)www.drop.org @dmjossel: thanks. @all. The strange problem I reported was apparently php 5 related. After applying Steven's php 5 patch it went away. One error is remaining: If I create a new forum topic it will be shown as part of the book on preview. Hmm, that was due to a db that got corrupted during testing so that is fixed too. Please poke around at the test site and look if you find more errors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 09:16 : Steven By the way, I just remembered that Drupal.org has some blogs lingering on in the database even though blog.module is not enabled. Perhaps this is causing troubles? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 13:22 : Anonymous I can't see why it would. Drupal.org will need extra updates for images and project nodes because those have their own tables. GK. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 6, 2005 - 14:49 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_16.patch (52.49 KB) Updated to apply to cvs again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 22, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_17.patch (49.64 KB) Updated again. All we need is a patch to upload module and an upgrade path for it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 4, 2005 - 06:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_18.patch (52.31 KB) Updated once more. Moved log field from book to node_revisions table as discussed in Antwerp. upload module still missing. We need to decide under which circumstances the log field should be displayed. Should that be added to the workflow? Should it depend on the revisions setting? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:27 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_20.patch (75.52 KB) Ok, here it is: Yet another revision of this grrrrreat patch. Changes from previous versions: - supports versioning for uploaded files. A problem is that if you delete a file, it will be gone for all revisions. - the log field is now in the node_revsions table, but each module has to decide whether to show it or not. I've implemented it for the page and the book type odes. Also, the field can be edited when adding non-book nodes to the book. The log is displayed on the revisions page and if a node is moderated. - the revisions are moved to an old_revisions table to a) get the node table smaller and b) still leave the mavailable for contrib modules that want to retreive old version data. The patch has been applied to killes.drupaldevs.org/revision where it can be tested by anybody (especially people who have "site admin" rights on drupal.org) The database is from drupal.org and you should b able to log in with your pass or simply mail yourself a new one. Gerhard ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:51 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch (59.42 KB) BTW, I marked this a bug because atm the revisions field can grow quite big. Neil has reported problems from some users who were not able to load some nodes due to to many large revisions. Also, som unrelated stuff crept into the patch. New version attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 8, 2005 - 07:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_22.patch (60.29 KB) Ok, I think I got it. Changes to last version: - uploads are no properly versioned. Missing are still pgsql checks and updates. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 10, 2005 - 18:58 : Anonymous Was able to get http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch to work with drupal-cvs.tar.gz (10 March 2005) by: - includes/database.mysql.inc: Commenting out duplicates for functions function db_begin_transaction and function db_commit_transaction - modules: node.module: Removing "'title' => $node->title," from $node_table_values variable declaration and removing "'title' => "'%s'"," from "$node_table_types" variable declaration. Happy to submit a patch if requested. I'll watch this thread. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 12, 2005 - 01:59 : killes(a)www.drop.org The duplicate function has been removed in rev 22 of this patch. Why do you think the changes in node_save are needed? Titles are saved in both tables for performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:12 : jlerner Hi - I posted comment #62. The changes to node_save appear to be needed because recent patches (both 21 and 22) remove the field 'title' from table 'node'. So without the changes to node_save, node.module is broken and generates errors. Joshua ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:29 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_23.patch (61.17 KB) Thanks, Joshua, for catching this. node:title is there to stay. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 13, 2005 - 18:29 : moshe weitzman since HEAD is open again, perhaps it is a good time to revisit this patch. once this is committed, lets address - http://drupal.org/node/11071 "node_validate does not respect group editing" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 18:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24_0.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:19 : Dries I'll commit this patch later this week! If you haven't checked this patch already, I urge you to test/check it out because it will have significant impact on existing code and modules! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:21 : Dries Also, what do people think about the n.title being duplicated? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:26 : chx I won't lose any sleep because of duplicated titles... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 20:35 : killes(a)www.drop.org Let me explain why I have chosen to duplicate the title (and also the uid): If you look at all the queries in Drupal, you will find that most of them only need the title and th uid of a node. That is, by duplicating it, we save expensive joins on the node_revisions table. Due to this fact, this patch is actually a performance improvement. A note about updating contrib module: Strictly speaking they wouldn't need to be updated. They only need to if their authors decide that their info should be available for revisioning. The upgrade path for forum.module in my update.inc patch (+ the forum patch) should show you what needs to be done. I will write a note for the update page once the patch hits core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2005 - 23:21 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch (60.38 KB) Updated to cvs. Dries: Based on some remarks in #drupal this is the last update I am going to do. Apply it or won't fix it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 05:42 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch.patch (528 bytes) That's a big patch. I've only started looking through it. I noticed one little typo, affecting updates. A patch to your last patch is attached. I'm running with the revision patch on my dev server now happily. I like the concept. What happens if you click 'stop' on your browser in the middle of a MySQL "transaction"? I assume that kills the connection to MySQL, and the lock is freed? But this then leaves changes only partially applied? What exactly does locking/unlocking the tables buy us in MySQL? I don't see anywhere that we detect if an apply fails part way through, and thus roll back...? What am I missing? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 09:11 : Dries Jeremy: many of us are worried about the performance ramifications this patch introduces. Early experiments showed a small performance improvement (while a performance regression might be expected). More performance reports from large sites like kerneltrap.org will certainly help this patch. Mind to do a quick performance comparision and to report back with some numbers? Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 14:38 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Dries: I'm not running HEAD on kerneltrap, so this really isn't a possibility. Furthermore, until I understand why we're locking tables, I don't like it. The idea of revisions in their own tables is great. The idea of locking tables to get (without any obvious benefit) there really worries me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 16:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Jeremy: Thanks for looking at the patch! Also for catching the typo. :) Did you try to upgrade your database? If yes, how did it go? One of Dries' concerns is the complexity of the upgrade. How many nodes and revisions did the db have? About database locking: This part of the patch was created by Nick and I simply continued to use it. Maybe the code should rather be: if(db_begin_transaction(array('{node}', '{node_revisions}', '{watchdog}', '{sessions}', '{files}'))) { db_query($node_query, $node_table_values); db_query($revisions_query, $revisions_table_values); db_commit_transaction(); ... } The idea is probably to avoid two updates at the same time. I don't think the locking helps if you abort the script at an inconvenient time. Rollbacks aren't implemented in all mysql versions. We could omit the db locking if deemed inappropriate. Maybe Nick can explain his ideas behind this. @Dries: I wonder who the "many of us" are. They certainly haven't spoken to me. Moshe had some reservations about the upgrade path and project module, but the time that project module abused revisions to store issue updates was long ago and his reservations were resolved. Nobody else (besides you of course and now Jeremy) has voiced reservations in a way that was audible to me. If you grep through the patch you will notice that there are only four queries which have a join on the node_revisions table. Two of them are in node_load and in the other cases the join replaced a join on the node table. The two queries in node_load are the only ones that have both a join on the node and the revisions query. Thus, loading of individual nodes might become somewhat slower. All other queries will be faster since the node table is now much smaller. Also, node loading does not have to be slower, it depends on your node table. If you had a lot of revisions and thus a large table, then the new scheme will make your queries actually faster since we do not load the revisions on each and every node load anymore. If you didn't have many revisions your node_load migth be somewhat slower. WRT to the update script Karoly pointed out that we could use multiple insert queries instead one query per revision. This would probably make the update somewhat faster. I am willing to work on this iff you declare that you will commit the patch afterwards. I'd need to know if this will work on pgsql and on all supported mysql versions before I work on it. About locking: Database locking is dog slow, at least on mysql. I was using locks in an earlier version of the upgrade script but had to remove it for (serious!) performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 17:07 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_26.patch (46.45 KB) Ok, another update, cause I need it myself. I've left out the transaction stuff for now. It is in principle unrelated to this patch and should be discussed elsewhere. This also makes the patch smaller and easier to review (hint, hint). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_27.patch (39.05 KB) The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:23 : Dries Got one error during the upgrade path: ALTER TABLE {book} ADD PRIMARY KEY vid (vid) FAILED ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:26 : killes(a)www.drop.org This had happend to me as well, when I tested this patch. The reason is that for some reason the vid is not unique. Most likely there are some entries with vid = 0 in there. Can you check which node types those have? it always was an error in the test database. See: http://drupal.org/node/7582#comment-20678 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:27 : Dries Actually, I got 2850 errors during the upgrade. Some of these: sprintf() [function.sprintf]: Too few arguments in drupal-cvs/includes/database.inc on line 154. Some of these: Query was empty query: in drupal-cvs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66. And this: Unknown table 'n' in field list query: SELECT n.nid, n.vid FROM node INNER JOIN files f ON n.nid = f.nid in drupal-cvs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66. :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:29 : Dries Or this: user error: Unknown column 'log' in 'field list' query: SELECT parent, weight, log FROM book WHERE nid = 1 in drupal-cvs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66

1 0

[drupal-devel] [bug] Put revisions in their own table
by Dries 09 May '05

09 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/7582 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: node system Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: killes(a)www.drop.org Reported by: killes(a)www.drop.org Updated by: Dries Status: patch Or this: user error: Unknown column 'log' in 'field list' query: SELECT parent, weight, log FROM book WHERE nid = 1 in drupal-cvs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66 Dries Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 18:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Currently all node revisions are stored in a serialized field in node.table and retrieved for _each_ page view although they are rarely needed. However, we have agreed that serializing data is bad and that we should try to keep the memory foot print pf Drupal small. Therefore I propose to create a separate revisions table which would be in principle identical to the node table, only that it could have several old copies of the same node. Extra data added by other modules could be added in a serialized field unless we find a better solution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:06 : jhriggs I too think the serialized approach is less than desirable, but here's an alternative. This would likely take some considerable rework in core and contrib, but the following is how we handle similar types of situations in our databases at work. It is more elegant that a separate table, and avoids the (almost exact) duplication of a table. Instead of separate tables, keep all revisions of nodes in the node table as follows: * add field: active (0/1 or Y/N) * add field: revision * every revision of a node is stored in the node table; however, only one revision can be active at any given time * nid can no longer be unique -- primary/unique key becomes (nid, active) * any time a node is loaded, updated (without revision), etc., the active version is used. Thoughts? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org I am not opposed to your scheme, but I want to stress the following: * Duplicating a table's structure is not bad (IMHO) as long as the content is different. * having two tables will allow us to have a rather small node table. This is (maybe) a performance gain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 20:37 : jhriggs I don't necessarily think that duplicating a table's structure is _bad_. It just seems to be wasteful and a pain to maintain. (Every change to the node table is made twice...easy to do, but also easy to miss perhaps.) As for performance, as long as nid and the active indicator are indexed, there shouldn't be any performance loss. Also, archiving an old version when making a new revision will be much simpler: just change the active indicator rather than copying an entire node to another table (and ensuring everything gets copied...again a potential maintainance issue). To be honest, I would just like to see the serialized data go away, regarless of what approach is taken. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:49 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_07-30-2004.p… (10.47 KB) I'm interested in using Drupal for a large scale wiki-type project. In order to do this, I need revisions to be in their own table. Attached is a patch to do just that. Most of the changes are pretty self explanatory. Spreading out node data across two tables meant that I had to add database functions to do locking/transactions. Without this, race conditions in which the database becomes corrupted are possible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:54 : Nick Nassar Oh yeah... The patch is a diff against Drupal CVS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 02:00 : Anonymous Gerhard speaking. Nick, thanks a lot for your nice patch! It saves me a great deal of labour. I looked through it and immediately liked it. You not only put the old revisions into a new table but also the current one. Do you have an estimate how much more expensive the additional join is? Besides a few minor coding style issues I found a major one: Just a few hours before you uploaded your patch JonBob's node access patch hit core. That means your patch won't apply anymore as all the queries you change have been changed. Can I bug you to update your patch? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 03:11 : Anonymous Also I think that your upgrade path loses existing revisions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 04:39 : drumm I think this is the proper way to do things. No columns are duplicated, there is no serialized data, and only the fields that are logically revised are stored. Nothing jumped out at me as a way to have my node modules be able to keep a table of revisions of additional fields. I'm guessing this could be done within the confines of _insert and _update. Assuming the upgrade path works and modules can extend it I give it a +1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 16:40 : Nick Nassar It figures that just as I finish a big patch, another patch comes along and breaks it. Oh well, it should be a pretty easy to fix. I'll work on it. Fixing the upgrade path to keep revisions should be fairly painless. I found another issue that needs to be fixed before this patch gets merged. There format of a node needs to be stored for each revision. Otherwise, for modules that store a format for the nodes, such as page and book, if you write one revision in PHP and the next in HTML, the PHP revision will be displayed as HTML. This is part of a larger issue of how node modules should store revisions of additional fields. I think each module that wants to do this should create another table with (nid, revid) as the primary key. Just as when they want to add fields to a node they create another table with nid as the primary key. As far as performance goes, for sites that make heavy use of revisions, an extra join on primary keys is going to be a lot faster than grabbing all of the revisions from that database everytime. We would need to run benchmarks to determine is the overall difference in speed is for an average site is a gain or a loss. I'm guessing it's very minor either way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 15:55 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_08-23-2004.p… (10.92 KB) Here's an updated patch against CVS that puts revisions in their own table, provides an upgrade path, and fixes the format related bugs in the last patch. Hopefully, this can make it into CVS as soon as the freeze is over. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 16:10 : moshe weitzman Interesting patch ... drumm's question is still outstanding. how do modules store revisions of their fields? Are they expected to manage this on their own? Thats not how it works today. As an aside, i am seeing profile_ fields in my node.revisions column. One could argue that those need not be saved. They pertain to the node author, not to the node itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 18:14 : Nick Nassar Having modules be responsible for storing revisions of their own fields is a side-effect of storing revision data in tables. There's really no way around it. However, revisions generally don't make sense for node types that don't have PHP/HTML content, such as polls. I think it's going to be a pretty rare scenario for a new node type to want another field to change per-revision, so it's a pretty good trade-off. Storing fields that shouldn't be part of revisions, such as the profile_ fields, is a side-effect of storing revisions as serialized objects. Applying this patch will free up that wasted space. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 19:20 : Anonymous There should be a hook that let's the module choose whether it supports history. This way a module author can prevent the user from doing something that may break his module or just cause undefined behavior. If the module doesn't support history then don't let the user/admin choose to add history to nodes of that type. Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 21:23 : Nick Nassar I agree, there should be an API change to make specifying support for revisions easier. In the interests of keeping patches small and keeping to one change per patch, I think the API change should be a separate issue. A sort of ad-hoc API to decide whether or not a module supports revisions by default already exists. Instead of having a hook, modules set the default value of the "Create new revision" field in the edit form. The admin can change this option in admin/node/configure/defaults. This patch doesn't change that. Revisions are broken for node types that have their own database structure, like polls, even when storing them as serialized objects. This patch doesn't change that, either. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 26, 2004 - 04:35 : moshe weitzman I'm guessing that someone is going to have to demonstrate that this patch performs as well as current drupal before it gets comitted. i think this patch is a few benchmarks from being comitted. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:04 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 15, 2004 - 07:05 : elias1884 please overthink the revision system default workflow as well. don't look at the revision system as an isolated system but as a part of the whole workflow system! if you combine revisions with the moderation queue the most logic default workflow would be like that: auth user creates node (revision #0) admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) => node publicly available auth user finds typo and changes node (revision #1, status = 0, moderation = 1) ------- what happens at that point at the moment is, that the node is not accessible anymore at all until the new revision is approved by admin. of course the new revision should not go online until reviewed and approved, this is absolutely correct, but there is no reason to not take the old revision offline, since it was already approved and should therefore be online until the new revision is approved. it is not practical if a node disappears only because the author corrected a typo. ------- admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) eventhough I first thought a plain boolean active field would not be capable of providing that functionality if finally came to the conclusion, that it can. The only thing to do is to not set that bit, when a new revision is created, but when it is approved (in case moderation is activated under default workflow). Every revision should have its own moderation, status and active field and on approval they are set like this (status=1, moderation=0, active=Y). When you wanna rollback to an old revision, you can chose between all revisions that already have the moderation bit set back to 0 again and the published to 1. There should be an extra permission for rollback! another concern that I have about the default workflow is, that users can't see the content, they have just created, when moderation is enabled. Eventhough, there is a big fat "submission accepted" presented after submissions, unexperienced users tend to question the information those stupid tincans give them, if they can't find their content afterwards. Many users are really lazy bastards and they don't even read the status messages. The best feedback about whether his story was submitted successfully or not of course is, if he can find the story somewhere on the site, maybe with a status message on top of it, mentioning, that the content is currently not publicly available since it has not been approved yet. there should be a my content section under my account, like somebody is trying to do with the workspace module I guess. so my suggestion is to make (status=0, moderation=1) still available for the creator under a my content section somewhere! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 24, 2004 - 06:21 : Nick Nassar I agree. The current workflow for moderation queues and revisions needs to change, but this patch isn't the place for it. The patch is already too big, and it only does the backend stuff. Instead of adding more to this patch and making it take even longer to get into core, would you mind creating a new issue for your UI suggestions, so the those changes can be added as a separate patch? Thanks, Nick ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 14:26 : Dries This patch is _much_ needed so I'd love to see someone revive it. In order for this patch to be accepted, the following needs to be done: Update this patch to CVS HEAD. Rename revid to vid. Rename node_rev to node_revisions. Rename node_rev.changed to node_revisions.timestamp. Rename $rnode to $revision. Fix the coding style to match Drupal's: proper spacing, single quotes where possible, proper variable names. Benchmark this patch with a large database with enough revisions. I'd be happy to benchmark this on my local copy of the drupal.org database. The book.log field should probably move to the node_revisions table. This can be done in a separate patch. Investigate whether transactions are well-supported. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 02:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004-r… (11.02 KB) I've worked a bit on the patch (coding style issues as mentioned by Dries). One thing I noticed is that the patch uses REPLACE. IIRC this needs to be chagned to "UPDATE, if fail INSERT" for pgsql compatibility. Nick, are you still interested in working on that patch? I'd like to know how it works on your site and work on getting it into core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 14:33 : Dries Gerhard: your patch does not apply. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 19:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org Yes, I know, that was the same version as I mailed to you earlier. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 23:02 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions.patch (52.96 KB) Ok, upüdated the patch to cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 10:58 : Dries Some more comments: db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() do not belong in database.inc, but in database.mysql.inc and database.pgsql.inc respectively. The node module calls node_revisionsision_list() which is not defined. (Fxed that on my local copy.) Do db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() deprecate Jeremy's table locking patch? The upgrade path assigns the wrong user ID to each revision. The upgrade path assigns the wrong date to each revision (that or a node's revision page shows the wrong usernames/dates). The coding style needs a bit of work, but we can worry about that later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:34 : Nick Nassar If you need any help getting those things fixed, just let me know. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:50 : Nick Nassar How this relates to Jeremy's node locking patch: There was lots of discussion, and node locking was decided against because from an end user point of view you never want a node to be locked. He's now advocating for a much simpler patch that warns users if their changes will overwrite someone elses. That patch still has a race condition, which might be fixed using db_begin_transaction(). http://drupal.org/node/6025 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 00:26 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_0.patch (55.96 KB) Here is an updated patch that tries to address Dries concerns. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 10:32 : Dries Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions-bug.png (76.06 KB) It didn't fix the aforementioned bugs. See attached screenshot. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 6, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_1.patch (51.77 KB) Ok, here is a new version. Dries and myself worked hart at it, so please have a look. what is still missing - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 23:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_2.patch (49.49 KB) Here is an updated patch. We discussed to keep the current title in node module and also in the revisiosn table. This is content duplication but will save many joins as many queries only need the title of a node. Discussion is welcome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 01:33 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_3.patch (29.93 KB) I've implemented the aforementioned solution. This makes the patch much smaller. The patch now also removes taxonomy_node_has_term() which wasn't used anywhere. I'd really apprciate if some people could test drive the patch. It will be another huge improvement for 4.6. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 02:05 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_4.patch (30 KB) Another revision. Steven didn't like my literal $node->vid in queries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 03:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. These issues are still open, btw. Especially the first one needs to be tackled. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 25, 2005 - 22:11 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_5.patch (51.13 KB) Here is a patch that has the database tables updated for forum, book, and page module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_6.patch (49.18 KB) Yet another update to keep it working with head. The patch now also removes the table definitons for the page table. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_7.patch (55.69 KB) Sorry, that was the old version, this is the right one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 21:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_8.patch (55.71 KB) Updated once more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 22:52 : Dries Anyone to help review/test this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 23:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_9.patch (49.29 KB) Updated again, the update functions occurred twice. Thanks Bart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Don't know if the db I am using is corrupted or what. I still do have some didficulties. The latest patch is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_10.patch (49.67 KB) I am probably slowly going mad ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 03:54 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_11.patch (48.95 KB) The update issue still needs investigating. This patch is updated for cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 22:20 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_12.patch (49.83 KB) Ok, here is a new version. I've solved my troubles with book.module. There are still some issues with forum module. Possibly due to inconsistent database. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 23:31 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_13.patch (49.83 KB) Turns out the drupal.org database had indeed some quirks. Please run this query in your oldest db and tell me the result: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; If you get a non-zero result we might need to add another security update. The patch could use still more testing, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 03:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_14.patch (49 KB) Ok, we are getting somewhere. At a first glance the update is working. There is a problem remaining: the revisions tab will be shown whether the node has revisions or not. Not sure we can/need to fix this. People with a drupal.org account can log in at http://killes.drupaldevs.org/revision/ and poke around. Your permissions will be the same as on drupal.org. Feel free to vreak everything but don't forget to file complaints here. (Note: this is only a pruned version of the drupal.org database with all project nodes and nodes with nids > 7000 dropped). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 06:19 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_15.patch (52.39 KB) There was some error in node_save and also the patches to the database.inc files got lost... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:07 : robertDouglass Submitting book pages doesn't work on your test site. It puts the entire content of the preview inside the body textarea. I wrote a sentence in the body and the log, and pressing preview put several lines of HTML containing both sentences in the body textarea on the preview page, plus the book page wouldn't submit. -R ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:50 : Junyor 0 results here. I started using Drupal with version 4.4, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 01:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Junyor: Thanks, that's a good sign. Maybe somebody else has an older db to try. @robertDouglass: The first effect you describe is due to drupaldevs running on PHP 5. I am unsure why the second thing does not work. In node_save() the node object has a nid although there is none in the form. Very strange. I've enabled display of db queries on the testsite. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 21:17 : dmjossel No results here on the query: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; On a database that was put in place prior to Drupal 4 and is now running on 4.5.2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 22:44 : killes(a)www.drop.org @dmjossel: thanks. @all. The strange problem I reported was apparently php 5 related. After applying Steven's php 5 patch it went away. One error is remaining: If I create a new forum topic it will be shown as part of the book on preview. Hmm, that was due to a db that got corrupted during testing so that is fixed too. Please poke around at the test site and look if you find more errors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 09:16 : Steven By the way, I just remembered that Drupal.org has some blogs lingering on in the database even though blog.module is not enabled. Perhaps this is causing troubles? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 13:22 : Anonymous I can't see why it would. Drupal.org will need extra updates for images and project nodes because those have their own tables. GK. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 6, 2005 - 14:49 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_16.patch (52.49 KB) Updated to apply to cvs again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 22, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_17.patch (49.64 KB) Updated again. All we need is a patch to upload module and an upgrade path for it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 4, 2005 - 06:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_18.patch (52.31 KB) Updated once more. Moved log field from book to node_revisions table as discussed in Antwerp. upload module still missing. We need to decide under which circumstances the log field should be displayed. Should that be added to the workflow? Should it depend on the revisions setting? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:27 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_20.patch (75.52 KB) Ok, here it is: Yet another revision of this grrrrreat patch. Changes from previous versions: - supports versioning for uploaded files. A problem is that if you delete a file, it will be gone for all revisions. - the log field is now in the node_revsions table, but each module has to decide whether to show it or not. I've implemented it for the page and the book type odes. Also, the field can be edited when adding non-book nodes to the book. The log is displayed on the revisions page and if a node is moderated. - the revisions are moved to an old_revisions table to a) get the node table smaller and b) still leave the mavailable for contrib modules that want to retreive old version data. The patch has been applied to killes.drupaldevs.org/revision where it can be tested by anybody (especially people who have "site admin" rights on drupal.org) The database is from drupal.org and you should b able to log in with your pass or simply mail yourself a new one. Gerhard ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:51 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch (59.42 KB) BTW, I marked this a bug because atm the revisions field can grow quite big. Neil has reported problems from some users who were not able to load some nodes due to to many large revisions. Also, som unrelated stuff crept into the patch. New version attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 8, 2005 - 07:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_22.patch (60.29 KB) Ok, I think I got it. Changes to last version: - uploads are no properly versioned. Missing are still pgsql checks and updates. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 10, 2005 - 18:58 : Anonymous Was able to get http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch to work with drupal-cvs.tar.gz (10 March 2005) by: - includes/database.mysql.inc: Commenting out duplicates for functions function db_begin_transaction and function db_commit_transaction - modules: node.module: Removing "'title' => $node->title," from $node_table_values variable declaration and removing "'title' => "'%s'"," from "$node_table_types" variable declaration. Happy to submit a patch if requested. I'll watch this thread. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 12, 2005 - 01:59 : killes(a)www.drop.org The duplicate function has been removed in rev 22 of this patch. Why do you think the changes in node_save are needed? Titles are saved in both tables for performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:12 : jlerner Hi - I posted comment #62. The changes to node_save appear to be needed because recent patches (both 21 and 22) remove the field 'title' from table 'node'. So without the changes to node_save, node.module is broken and generates errors. Joshua ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:29 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_23.patch (61.17 KB) Thanks, Joshua, for catching this. node:title is there to stay. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 13, 2005 - 18:29 : moshe weitzman since HEAD is open again, perhaps it is a good time to revisit this patch. once this is committed, lets address - http://drupal.org/node/11071 "node_validate does not respect group editing" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 18:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24_0.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:19 : Dries I'll commit this patch later this week! If you haven't checked this patch already, I urge you to test/check it out because it will have significant impact on existing code and modules! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:21 : Dries Also, what do people think about the n.title being duplicated? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:26 : chx I won't lose any sleep because of duplicated titles... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 20:35 : killes(a)www.drop.org Let me explain why I have chosen to duplicate the title (and also the uid): If you look at all the queries in Drupal, you will find that most of them only need the title and th uid of a node. That is, by duplicating it, we save expensive joins on the node_revisions table. Due to this fact, this patch is actually a performance improvement. A note about updating contrib module: Strictly speaking they wouldn't need to be updated. They only need to if their authors decide that their info should be available for revisioning. The upgrade path for forum.module in my update.inc patch (+ the forum patch) should show you what needs to be done. I will write a note for the update page once the patch hits core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2005 - 23:21 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch (60.38 KB) Updated to cvs. Dries: Based on some remarks in #drupal this is the last update I am going to do. Apply it or won't fix it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 05:42 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch.patch (528 bytes) That's a big patch. I've only started looking through it. I noticed one little typo, affecting updates. A patch to your last patch is attached. I'm running with the revision patch on my dev server now happily. I like the concept. What happens if you click 'stop' on your browser in the middle of a MySQL "transaction"? I assume that kills the connection to MySQL, and the lock is freed? But this then leaves changes only partially applied? What exactly does locking/unlocking the tables buy us in MySQL? I don't see anywhere that we detect if an apply fails part way through, and thus roll back...? What am I missing? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 09:11 : Dries Jeremy: many of us are worried about the performance ramifications this patch introduces. Early experiments showed a small performance improvement (while a performance regression might be expected). More performance reports from large sites like kerneltrap.org will certainly help this patch. Mind to do a quick performance comparision and to report back with some numbers? Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 14:38 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Dries: I'm not running HEAD on kerneltrap, so this really isn't a possibility. Furthermore, until I understand why we're locking tables, I don't like it. The idea of revisions in their own tables is great. The idea of locking tables to get (without any obvious benefit) there really worries me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 16:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Jeremy: Thanks for looking at the patch! Also for catching the typo. :) Did you try to upgrade your database? If yes, how did it go? One of Dries' concerns is the complexity of the upgrade. How many nodes and revisions did the db have? About database locking: This part of the patch was created by Nick and I simply continued to use it. Maybe the code should rather be: if(db_begin_transaction(array('{node}', '{node_revisions}', '{watchdog}', '{sessions}', '{files}'))) { db_query($node_query, $node_table_values); db_query($revisions_query, $revisions_table_values); db_commit_transaction(); ... } The idea is probably to avoid two updates at the same time. I don't think the locking helps if you abort the script at an inconvenient time. Rollbacks aren't implemented in all mysql versions. We could omit the db locking if deemed inappropriate. Maybe Nick can explain his ideas behind this. @Dries: I wonder who the "many of us" are. They certainly haven't spoken to me. Moshe had some reservations about the upgrade path and project module, but the time that project module abused revisions to store issue updates was long ago and his reservations were resolved. Nobody else (besides you of course and now Jeremy) has voiced reservations in a way that was audible to me. If you grep through the patch you will notice that there are only four queries which have a join on the node_revisions table. Two of them are in node_load and in the other cases the join replaced a join on the node table. The two queries in node_load are the only ones that have both a join on the node and the revisions query. Thus, loading of individual nodes might become somewhat slower. All other queries will be faster since the node table is now much smaller. Also, node loading does not have to be slower, it depends on your node table. If you had a lot of revisions and thus a large table, then the new scheme will make your queries actually faster since we do not load the revisions on each and every node load anymore. If you didn't have many revisions your node_load migth be somewhat slower. WRT to the update script Karoly pointed out that we could use multiple insert queries instead one query per revision. This would probably make the update somewhat faster. I am willing to work on this iff you declare that you will commit the patch afterwards. I'd need to know if this will work on pgsql and on all supported mysql versions before I work on it. About locking: Database locking is dog slow, at least on mysql. I was using locks in an earlier version of the upgrade script but had to remove it for (serious!) performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 17:07 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_26.patch (46.45 KB) Ok, another update, cause I need it myself. I've left out the transaction stuff for now. It is in principle unrelated to this patch and should be discussed elsewhere. This also makes the patch smaller and easier to review (hint, hint). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_27.patch (39.05 KB) The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:23 : Dries Got one error during the upgrade path: ALTER TABLE {book} ADD PRIMARY KEY vid (vid) FAILED ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:26 : killes(a)www.drop.org This had happend to me as well, when I tested this patch. The reason is that for some reason the vid is not unique. Most likely there are some entries with vid = 0 in there. Can you check which node types those have? it always was an error in the test database. See: http://drupal.org/node/7582#comment-20678 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:27 : Dries Actually, I got 2850 errors during the upgrade. Some of these: sprintf() [function.sprintf]: Too few arguments in drupal-cvs/includes/database.inc on line 154. Some of these: Query was empty query: in drupal-cvs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66. And this: Unknown table 'n' in field list query: SELECT n.nid, n.vid FROM node INNER JOIN files f ON n.nid = f.nid in drupal-cvs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66. :-)

1 0

[drupal-devel] [bug] Put revisions in their own table
by Dries 09 May '05

09 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/7582 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: node system Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: killes(a)www.drop.org Reported by: killes(a)www.drop.org Updated by: Dries Status: patch Actually, I got 2850 errors during the upgrade. Some of these: sprintf() [function.sprintf]: Too few arguments in drupal-cvs/includes/database.inc on line 154. Some of these: Query was empty query: in drupal-cvs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66. And this: Unknown table 'n' in field list query: SELECT n.nid, n.vid FROM node INNER JOIN files f ON n.nid = f.nid in drupal-cvs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66. :-) Dries Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 18:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Currently all node revisions are stored in a serialized field in node.table and retrieved for _each_ page view although they are rarely needed. However, we have agreed that serializing data is bad and that we should try to keep the memory foot print pf Drupal small. Therefore I propose to create a separate revisions table which would be in principle identical to the node table, only that it could have several old copies of the same node. Extra data added by other modules could be added in a serialized field unless we find a better solution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:06 : jhriggs I too think the serialized approach is less than desirable, but here's an alternative. This would likely take some considerable rework in core and contrib, but the following is how we handle similar types of situations in our databases at work. It is more elegant that a separate table, and avoids the (almost exact) duplication of a table. Instead of separate tables, keep all revisions of nodes in the node table as follows: * add field: active (0/1 or Y/N) * add field: revision * every revision of a node is stored in the node table; however, only one revision can be active at any given time * nid can no longer be unique -- primary/unique key becomes (nid, active) * any time a node is loaded, updated (without revision), etc., the active version is used. Thoughts? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org I am not opposed to your scheme, but I want to stress the following: * Duplicating a table's structure is not bad (IMHO) as long as the content is different. * having two tables will allow us to have a rather small node table. This is (maybe) a performance gain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 20:37 : jhriggs I don't necessarily think that duplicating a table's structure is _bad_. It just seems to be wasteful and a pain to maintain. (Every change to the node table is made twice...easy to do, but also easy to miss perhaps.) As for performance, as long as nid and the active indicator are indexed, there shouldn't be any performance loss. Also, archiving an old version when making a new revision will be much simpler: just change the active indicator rather than copying an entire node to another table (and ensuring everything gets copied...again a potential maintainance issue). To be honest, I would just like to see the serialized data go away, regarless of what approach is taken. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:49 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_07-30-2004.p… (10.47 KB) I'm interested in using Drupal for a large scale wiki-type project. In order to do this, I need revisions to be in their own table. Attached is a patch to do just that. Most of the changes are pretty self explanatory. Spreading out node data across two tables meant that I had to add database functions to do locking/transactions. Without this, race conditions in which the database becomes corrupted are possible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:54 : Nick Nassar Oh yeah... The patch is a diff against Drupal CVS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 02:00 : Anonymous Gerhard speaking. Nick, thanks a lot for your nice patch! It saves me a great deal of labour. I looked through it and immediately liked it. You not only put the old revisions into a new table but also the current one. Do you have an estimate how much more expensive the additional join is? Besides a few minor coding style issues I found a major one: Just a few hours before you uploaded your patch JonBob's node access patch hit core. That means your patch won't apply anymore as all the queries you change have been changed. Can I bug you to update your patch? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 03:11 : Anonymous Also I think that your upgrade path loses existing revisions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 04:39 : drumm I think this is the proper way to do things. No columns are duplicated, there is no serialized data, and only the fields that are logically revised are stored. Nothing jumped out at me as a way to have my node modules be able to keep a table of revisions of additional fields. I'm guessing this could be done within the confines of _insert and _update. Assuming the upgrade path works and modules can extend it I give it a +1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 16:40 : Nick Nassar It figures that just as I finish a big patch, another patch comes along and breaks it. Oh well, it should be a pretty easy to fix. I'll work on it. Fixing the upgrade path to keep revisions should be fairly painless. I found another issue that needs to be fixed before this patch gets merged. There format of a node needs to be stored for each revision. Otherwise, for modules that store a format for the nodes, such as page and book, if you write one revision in PHP and the next in HTML, the PHP revision will be displayed as HTML. This is part of a larger issue of how node modules should store revisions of additional fields. I think each module that wants to do this should create another table with (nid, revid) as the primary key. Just as when they want to add fields to a node they create another table with nid as the primary key. As far as performance goes, for sites that make heavy use of revisions, an extra join on primary keys is going to be a lot faster than grabbing all of the revisions from that database everytime. We would need to run benchmarks to determine is the overall difference in speed is for an average site is a gain or a loss. I'm guessing it's very minor either way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 15:55 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_08-23-2004.p… (10.92 KB) Here's an updated patch against CVS that puts revisions in their own table, provides an upgrade path, and fixes the format related bugs in the last patch. Hopefully, this can make it into CVS as soon as the freeze is over. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 16:10 : moshe weitzman Interesting patch ... drumm's question is still outstanding. how do modules store revisions of their fields? Are they expected to manage this on their own? Thats not how it works today. As an aside, i am seeing profile_ fields in my node.revisions column. One could argue that those need not be saved. They pertain to the node author, not to the node itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 18:14 : Nick Nassar Having modules be responsible for storing revisions of their own fields is a side-effect of storing revision data in tables. There's really no way around it. However, revisions generally don't make sense for node types that don't have PHP/HTML content, such as polls. I think it's going to be a pretty rare scenario for a new node type to want another field to change per-revision, so it's a pretty good trade-off. Storing fields that shouldn't be part of revisions, such as the profile_ fields, is a side-effect of storing revisions as serialized objects. Applying this patch will free up that wasted space. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 19:20 : Anonymous There should be a hook that let's the module choose whether it supports history. This way a module author can prevent the user from doing something that may break his module or just cause undefined behavior. If the module doesn't support history then don't let the user/admin choose to add history to nodes of that type. Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 21:23 : Nick Nassar I agree, there should be an API change to make specifying support for revisions easier. In the interests of keeping patches small and keeping to one change per patch, I think the API change should be a separate issue. A sort of ad-hoc API to decide whether or not a module supports revisions by default already exists. Instead of having a hook, modules set the default value of the "Create new revision" field in the edit form. The admin can change this option in admin/node/configure/defaults. This patch doesn't change that. Revisions are broken for node types that have their own database structure, like polls, even when storing them as serialized objects. This patch doesn't change that, either. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 26, 2004 - 04:35 : moshe weitzman I'm guessing that someone is going to have to demonstrate that this patch performs as well as current drupal before it gets comitted. i think this patch is a few benchmarks from being comitted. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:04 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 15, 2004 - 07:05 : elias1884 please overthink the revision system default workflow as well. don't look at the revision system as an isolated system but as a part of the whole workflow system! if you combine revisions with the moderation queue the most logic default workflow would be like that: auth user creates node (revision #0) admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) => node publicly available auth user finds typo and changes node (revision #1, status = 0, moderation = 1) ------- what happens at that point at the moment is, that the node is not accessible anymore at all until the new revision is approved by admin. of course the new revision should not go online until reviewed and approved, this is absolutely correct, but there is no reason to not take the old revision offline, since it was already approved and should therefore be online until the new revision is approved. it is not practical if a node disappears only because the author corrected a typo. ------- admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) eventhough I first thought a plain boolean active field would not be capable of providing that functionality if finally came to the conclusion, that it can. The only thing to do is to not set that bit, when a new revision is created, but when it is approved (in case moderation is activated under default workflow). Every revision should have its own moderation, status and active field and on approval they are set like this (status=1, moderation=0, active=Y). When you wanna rollback to an old revision, you can chose between all revisions that already have the moderation bit set back to 0 again and the published to 1. There should be an extra permission for rollback! another concern that I have about the default workflow is, that users can't see the content, they have just created, when moderation is enabled. Eventhough, there is a big fat "submission accepted" presented after submissions, unexperienced users tend to question the information those stupid tincans give them, if they can't find their content afterwards. Many users are really lazy bastards and they don't even read the status messages. The best feedback about whether his story was submitted successfully or not of course is, if he can find the story somewhere on the site, maybe with a status message on top of it, mentioning, that the content is currently not publicly available since it has not been approved yet. there should be a my content section under my account, like somebody is trying to do with the workspace module I guess. so my suggestion is to make (status=0, moderation=1) still available for the creator under a my content section somewhere! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 24, 2004 - 06:21 : Nick Nassar I agree. The current workflow for moderation queues and revisions needs to change, but this patch isn't the place for it. The patch is already too big, and it only does the backend stuff. Instead of adding more to this patch and making it take even longer to get into core, would you mind creating a new issue for your UI suggestions, so the those changes can be added as a separate patch? Thanks, Nick ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 14:26 : Dries This patch is _much_ needed so I'd love to see someone revive it. In order for this patch to be accepted, the following needs to be done: Update this patch to CVS HEAD. Rename revid to vid. Rename node_rev to node_revisions. Rename node_rev.changed to node_revisions.timestamp. Rename $rnode to $revision. Fix the coding style to match Drupal's: proper spacing, single quotes where possible, proper variable names. Benchmark this patch with a large database with enough revisions. I'd be happy to benchmark this on my local copy of the drupal.org database. The book.log field should probably move to the node_revisions table. This can be done in a separate patch. Investigate whether transactions are well-supported. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 02:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004-r… (11.02 KB) I've worked a bit on the patch (coding style issues as mentioned by Dries). One thing I noticed is that the patch uses REPLACE. IIRC this needs to be chagned to "UPDATE, if fail INSERT" for pgsql compatibility. Nick, are you still interested in working on that patch? I'd like to know how it works on your site and work on getting it into core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 14:33 : Dries Gerhard: your patch does not apply. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 19:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org Yes, I know, that was the same version as I mailed to you earlier. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 23:02 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions.patch (52.96 KB) Ok, upüdated the patch to cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 10:58 : Dries Some more comments: db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() do not belong in database.inc, but in database.mysql.inc and database.pgsql.inc respectively. The node module calls node_revisionsision_list() which is not defined. (Fxed that on my local copy.) Do db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() deprecate Jeremy's table locking patch? The upgrade path assigns the wrong user ID to each revision. The upgrade path assigns the wrong date to each revision (that or a node's revision page shows the wrong usernames/dates). The coding style needs a bit of work, but we can worry about that later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:34 : Nick Nassar If you need any help getting those things fixed, just let me know. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:50 : Nick Nassar How this relates to Jeremy's node locking patch: There was lots of discussion, and node locking was decided against because from an end user point of view you never want a node to be locked. He's now advocating for a much simpler patch that warns users if their changes will overwrite someone elses. That patch still has a race condition, which might be fixed using db_begin_transaction(). http://drupal.org/node/6025 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 00:26 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_0.patch (55.96 KB) Here is an updated patch that tries to address Dries concerns. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 10:32 : Dries Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions-bug.png (76.06 KB) It didn't fix the aforementioned bugs. See attached screenshot. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 6, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_1.patch (51.77 KB) Ok, here is a new version. Dries and myself worked hart at it, so please have a look. what is still missing - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 23:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_2.patch (49.49 KB) Here is an updated patch. We discussed to keep the current title in node module and also in the revisiosn table. This is content duplication but will save many joins as many queries only need the title of a node. Discussion is welcome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 01:33 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_3.patch (29.93 KB) I've implemented the aforementioned solution. This makes the patch much smaller. The patch now also removes taxonomy_node_has_term() which wasn't used anywhere. I'd really apprciate if some people could test drive the patch. It will be another huge improvement for 4.6. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 02:05 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_4.patch (30 KB) Another revision. Steven didn't like my literal $node->vid in queries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 03:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. These issues are still open, btw. Especially the first one needs to be tackled. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 25, 2005 - 22:11 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_5.patch (51.13 KB) Here is a patch that has the database tables updated for forum, book, and page module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_6.patch (49.18 KB) Yet another update to keep it working with head. The patch now also removes the table definitons for the page table. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_7.patch (55.69 KB) Sorry, that was the old version, this is the right one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 21:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_8.patch (55.71 KB) Updated once more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 22:52 : Dries Anyone to help review/test this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 23:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_9.patch (49.29 KB) Updated again, the update functions occurred twice. Thanks Bart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Don't know if the db I am using is corrupted or what. I still do have some didficulties. The latest patch is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_10.patch (49.67 KB) I am probably slowly going mad ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 03:54 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_11.patch (48.95 KB) The update issue still needs investigating. This patch is updated for cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 22:20 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_12.patch (49.83 KB) Ok, here is a new version. I've solved my troubles with book.module. There are still some issues with forum module. Possibly due to inconsistent database. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 23:31 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_13.patch (49.83 KB) Turns out the drupal.org database had indeed some quirks. Please run this query in your oldest db and tell me the result: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; If you get a non-zero result we might need to add another security update. The patch could use still more testing, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 03:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_14.patch (49 KB) Ok, we are getting somewhere. At a first glance the update is working. There is a problem remaining: the revisions tab will be shown whether the node has revisions or not. Not sure we can/need to fix this. People with a drupal.org account can log in at http://killes.drupaldevs.org/revision/ and poke around. Your permissions will be the same as on drupal.org. Feel free to vreak everything but don't forget to file complaints here. (Note: this is only a pruned version of the drupal.org database with all project nodes and nodes with nids > 7000 dropped). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 06:19 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_15.patch (52.39 KB) There was some error in node_save and also the patches to the database.inc files got lost... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:07 : robertDouglass Submitting book pages doesn't work on your test site. It puts the entire content of the preview inside the body textarea. I wrote a sentence in the body and the log, and pressing preview put several lines of HTML containing both sentences in the body textarea on the preview page, plus the book page wouldn't submit. -R ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:50 : Junyor 0 results here. I started using Drupal with version 4.4, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 01:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Junyor: Thanks, that's a good sign. Maybe somebody else has an older db to try. @robertDouglass: The first effect you describe is due to drupaldevs running on PHP 5. I am unsure why the second thing does not work. In node_save() the node object has a nid although there is none in the form. Very strange. I've enabled display of db queries on the testsite. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 21:17 : dmjossel No results here on the query: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; On a database that was put in place prior to Drupal 4 and is now running on 4.5.2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 22:44 : killes(a)www.drop.org @dmjossel: thanks. @all. The strange problem I reported was apparently php 5 related. After applying Steven's php 5 patch it went away. One error is remaining: If I create a new forum topic it will be shown as part of the book on preview. Hmm, that was due to a db that got corrupted during testing so that is fixed too. Please poke around at the test site and look if you find more errors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 09:16 : Steven By the way, I just remembered that Drupal.org has some blogs lingering on in the database even though blog.module is not enabled. Perhaps this is causing troubles? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 13:22 : Anonymous I can't see why it would. Drupal.org will need extra updates for images and project nodes because those have their own tables. GK. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 6, 2005 - 14:49 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_16.patch (52.49 KB) Updated to apply to cvs again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 22, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_17.patch (49.64 KB) Updated again. All we need is a patch to upload module and an upgrade path for it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 4, 2005 - 06:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_18.patch (52.31 KB) Updated once more. Moved log field from book to node_revisions table as discussed in Antwerp. upload module still missing. We need to decide under which circumstances the log field should be displayed. Should that be added to the workflow? Should it depend on the revisions setting? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:27 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_20.patch (75.52 KB) Ok, here it is: Yet another revision of this grrrrreat patch. Changes from previous versions: - supports versioning for uploaded files. A problem is that if you delete a file, it will be gone for all revisions. - the log field is now in the node_revsions table, but each module has to decide whether to show it or not. I've implemented it for the page and the book type odes. Also, the field can be edited when adding non-book nodes to the book. The log is displayed on the revisions page and if a node is moderated. - the revisions are moved to an old_revisions table to a) get the node table smaller and b) still leave the mavailable for contrib modules that want to retreive old version data. The patch has been applied to killes.drupaldevs.org/revision where it can be tested by anybody (especially people who have "site admin" rights on drupal.org) The database is from drupal.org and you should b able to log in with your pass or simply mail yourself a new one. Gerhard ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:51 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch (59.42 KB) BTW, I marked this a bug because atm the revisions field can grow quite big. Neil has reported problems from some users who were not able to load some nodes due to to many large revisions. Also, som unrelated stuff crept into the patch. New version attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 8, 2005 - 07:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_22.patch (60.29 KB) Ok, I think I got it. Changes to last version: - uploads are no properly versioned. Missing are still pgsql checks and updates. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 10, 2005 - 18:58 : Anonymous Was able to get http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch to work with drupal-cvs.tar.gz (10 March 2005) by: - includes/database.mysql.inc: Commenting out duplicates for functions function db_begin_transaction and function db_commit_transaction - modules: node.module: Removing "'title' => $node->title," from $node_table_values variable declaration and removing "'title' => "'%s'"," from "$node_table_types" variable declaration. Happy to submit a patch if requested. I'll watch this thread. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 12, 2005 - 01:59 : killes(a)www.drop.org The duplicate function has been removed in rev 22 of this patch. Why do you think the changes in node_save are needed? Titles are saved in both tables for performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:12 : jlerner Hi - I posted comment #62. The changes to node_save appear to be needed because recent patches (both 21 and 22) remove the field 'title' from table 'node'. So without the changes to node_save, node.module is broken and generates errors. Joshua ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:29 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_23.patch (61.17 KB) Thanks, Joshua, for catching this. node:title is there to stay. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 13, 2005 - 18:29 : moshe weitzman since HEAD is open again, perhaps it is a good time to revisit this patch. once this is committed, lets address - http://drupal.org/node/11071 "node_validate does not respect group editing" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 18:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24_0.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:19 : Dries I'll commit this patch later this week! If you haven't checked this patch already, I urge you to test/check it out because it will have significant impact on existing code and modules! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:21 : Dries Also, what do people think about the n.title being duplicated? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:26 : chx I won't lose any sleep because of duplicated titles... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 20:35 : killes(a)www.drop.org Let me explain why I have chosen to duplicate the title (and also the uid): If you look at all the queries in Drupal, you will find that most of them only need the title and th uid of a node. That is, by duplicating it, we save expensive joins on the node_revisions table. Due to this fact, this patch is actually a performance improvement. A note about updating contrib module: Strictly speaking they wouldn't need to be updated. They only need to if their authors decide that their info should be available for revisioning. The upgrade path for forum.module in my update.inc patch (+ the forum patch) should show you what needs to be done. I will write a note for the update page once the patch hits core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2005 - 23:21 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch (60.38 KB) Updated to cvs. Dries: Based on some remarks in #drupal this is the last update I am going to do. Apply it or won't fix it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 05:42 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch.patch (528 bytes) That's a big patch. I've only started looking through it. I noticed one little typo, affecting updates. A patch to your last patch is attached. I'm running with the revision patch on my dev server now happily. I like the concept. What happens if you click 'stop' on your browser in the middle of a MySQL "transaction"? I assume that kills the connection to MySQL, and the lock is freed? But this then leaves changes only partially applied? What exactly does locking/unlocking the tables buy us in MySQL? I don't see anywhere that we detect if an apply fails part way through, and thus roll back...? What am I missing? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 09:11 : Dries Jeremy: many of us are worried about the performance ramifications this patch introduces. Early experiments showed a small performance improvement (while a performance regression might be expected). More performance reports from large sites like kerneltrap.org will certainly help this patch. Mind to do a quick performance comparision and to report back with some numbers? Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 14:38 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Dries: I'm not running HEAD on kerneltrap, so this really isn't a possibility. Furthermore, until I understand why we're locking tables, I don't like it. The idea of revisions in their own tables is great. The idea of locking tables to get (without any obvious benefit) there really worries me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 16:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Jeremy: Thanks for looking at the patch! Also for catching the typo. :) Did you try to upgrade your database? If yes, how did it go? One of Dries' concerns is the complexity of the upgrade. How many nodes and revisions did the db have? About database locking: This part of the patch was created by Nick and I simply continued to use it. Maybe the code should rather be: if(db_begin_transaction(array('{node}', '{node_revisions}', '{watchdog}', '{sessions}', '{files}'))) { db_query($node_query, $node_table_values); db_query($revisions_query, $revisions_table_values); db_commit_transaction(); ... } The idea is probably to avoid two updates at the same time. I don't think the locking helps if you abort the script at an inconvenient time. Rollbacks aren't implemented in all mysql versions. We could omit the db locking if deemed inappropriate. Maybe Nick can explain his ideas behind this. @Dries: I wonder who the "many of us" are. They certainly haven't spoken to me. Moshe had some reservations about the upgrade path and project module, but the time that project module abused revisions to store issue updates was long ago and his reservations were resolved. Nobody else (besides you of course and now Jeremy) has voiced reservations in a way that was audible to me. If you grep through the patch you will notice that there are only four queries which have a join on the node_revisions table. Two of them are in node_load and in the other cases the join replaced a join on the node table. The two queries in node_load are the only ones that have both a join on the node and the revisions query. Thus, loading of individual nodes might become somewhat slower. All other queries will be faster since the node table is now much smaller. Also, node loading does not have to be slower, it depends on your node table. If you had a lot of revisions and thus a large table, then the new scheme will make your queries actually faster since we do not load the revisions on each and every node load anymore. If you didn't have many revisions your node_load migth be somewhat slower. WRT to the update script Karoly pointed out that we could use multiple insert queries instead one query per revision. This would probably make the update somewhat faster. I am willing to work on this iff you declare that you will commit the patch afterwards. I'd need to know if this will work on pgsql and on all supported mysql versions before I work on it. About locking: Database locking is dog slow, at least on mysql. I was using locks in an earlier version of the upgrade script but had to remove it for (serious!) performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 17:07 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_26.patch (46.45 KB) Ok, another update, cause I need it myself. I've left out the transaction stuff for now. It is in principle unrelated to this patch and should be discussed elsewhere. This also makes the patch smaller and easier to review (hint, hint). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_27.patch (39.05 KB) The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:23 : Dries Got one error during the upgrade path: ALTER TABLE {book} ADD PRIMARY KEY vid (vid) FAILED ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:26 : killes(a)www.drop.org This had happend to me as well, when I tested this patch. The reason is that for some reason the vid is not unique. Most likely there are some entries with vid = 0 in there. Can you check which node types those have? it always was an error in the test database. See: http://drupal.org/node/7582#comment-20678

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[drupal-devel] [bug] Put revisions in their own table
by killes 09 May '05

09 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/7582 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: node system Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: killes(a)www.drop.org Reported by: killes(a)www.drop.org Updated by: killes(a)www.drop.org Status: patch This had happend to me as well, when I tested this patch. The reason is that for some reason the vid is not unique. Most likely there are some entries with vid = 0 in there. Can you check which node types those have? it always was an error in the test database. See: http://drupal.org/node/7582#comment-20678 killes(a)www.drop.org Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 18:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Currently all node revisions are stored in a serialized field in node.table and retrieved for _each_ page view although they are rarely needed. However, we have agreed that serializing data is bad and that we should try to keep the memory foot print pf Drupal small. Therefore I propose to create a separate revisions table which would be in principle identical to the node table, only that it could have several old copies of the same node. Extra data added by other modules could be added in a serialized field unless we find a better solution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:06 : jhriggs I too think the serialized approach is less than desirable, but here's an alternative. This would likely take some considerable rework in core and contrib, but the following is how we handle similar types of situations in our databases at work. It is more elegant that a separate table, and avoids the (almost exact) duplication of a table. Instead of separate tables, keep all revisions of nodes in the node table as follows: * add field: active (0/1 or Y/N) * add field: revision * every revision of a node is stored in the node table; however, only one revision can be active at any given time * nid can no longer be unique -- primary/unique key becomes (nid, active) * any time a node is loaded, updated (without revision), etc., the active version is used. Thoughts? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org I am not opposed to your scheme, but I want to stress the following: * Duplicating a table's structure is not bad (IMHO) as long as the content is different. * having two tables will allow us to have a rather small node table. This is (maybe) a performance gain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 20:37 : jhriggs I don't necessarily think that duplicating a table's structure is _bad_. It just seems to be wasteful and a pain to maintain. (Every change to the node table is made twice...easy to do, but also easy to miss perhaps.) As for performance, as long as nid and the active indicator are indexed, there shouldn't be any performance loss. Also, archiving an old version when making a new revision will be much simpler: just change the active indicator rather than copying an entire node to another table (and ensuring everything gets copied...again a potential maintainance issue). To be honest, I would just like to see the serialized data go away, regarless of what approach is taken. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:49 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_07-30-2004.p… (10.47 KB) I'm interested in using Drupal for a large scale wiki-type project. In order to do this, I need revisions to be in their own table. Attached is a patch to do just that. Most of the changes are pretty self explanatory. Spreading out node data across two tables meant that I had to add database functions to do locking/transactions. Without this, race conditions in which the database becomes corrupted are possible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:54 : Nick Nassar Oh yeah... The patch is a diff against Drupal CVS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 02:00 : Anonymous Gerhard speaking. Nick, thanks a lot for your nice patch! It saves me a great deal of labour. I looked through it and immediately liked it. You not only put the old revisions into a new table but also the current one. Do you have an estimate how much more expensive the additional join is? Besides a few minor coding style issues I found a major one: Just a few hours before you uploaded your patch JonBob's node access patch hit core. That means your patch won't apply anymore as all the queries you change have been changed. Can I bug you to update your patch? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 03:11 : Anonymous Also I think that your upgrade path loses existing revisions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 04:39 : drumm I think this is the proper way to do things. No columns are duplicated, there is no serialized data, and only the fields that are logically revised are stored. Nothing jumped out at me as a way to have my node modules be able to keep a table of revisions of additional fields. I'm guessing this could be done within the confines of _insert and _update. Assuming the upgrade path works and modules can extend it I give it a +1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 16:40 : Nick Nassar It figures that just as I finish a big patch, another patch comes along and breaks it. Oh well, it should be a pretty easy to fix. I'll work on it. Fixing the upgrade path to keep revisions should be fairly painless. I found another issue that needs to be fixed before this patch gets merged. There format of a node needs to be stored for each revision. Otherwise, for modules that store a format for the nodes, such as page and book, if you write one revision in PHP and the next in HTML, the PHP revision will be displayed as HTML. This is part of a larger issue of how node modules should store revisions of additional fields. I think each module that wants to do this should create another table with (nid, revid) as the primary key. Just as when they want to add fields to a node they create another table with nid as the primary key. As far as performance goes, for sites that make heavy use of revisions, an extra join on primary keys is going to be a lot faster than grabbing all of the revisions from that database everytime. We would need to run benchmarks to determine is the overall difference in speed is for an average site is a gain or a loss. I'm guessing it's very minor either way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 15:55 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_08-23-2004.p… (10.92 KB) Here's an updated patch against CVS that puts revisions in their own table, provides an upgrade path, and fixes the format related bugs in the last patch. Hopefully, this can make it into CVS as soon as the freeze is over. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 16:10 : moshe weitzman Interesting patch ... drumm's question is still outstanding. how do modules store revisions of their fields? Are they expected to manage this on their own? Thats not how it works today. As an aside, i am seeing profile_ fields in my node.revisions column. One could argue that those need not be saved. They pertain to the node author, not to the node itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 18:14 : Nick Nassar Having modules be responsible for storing revisions of their own fields is a side-effect of storing revision data in tables. There's really no way around it. However, revisions generally don't make sense for node types that don't have PHP/HTML content, such as polls. I think it's going to be a pretty rare scenario for a new node type to want another field to change per-revision, so it's a pretty good trade-off. Storing fields that shouldn't be part of revisions, such as the profile_ fields, is a side-effect of storing revisions as serialized objects. Applying this patch will free up that wasted space. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 19:20 : Anonymous There should be a hook that let's the module choose whether it supports history. This way a module author can prevent the user from doing something that may break his module or just cause undefined behavior. If the module doesn't support history then don't let the user/admin choose to add history to nodes of that type. Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 21:23 : Nick Nassar I agree, there should be an API change to make specifying support for revisions easier. In the interests of keeping patches small and keeping to one change per patch, I think the API change should be a separate issue. A sort of ad-hoc API to decide whether or not a module supports revisions by default already exists. Instead of having a hook, modules set the default value of the "Create new revision" field in the edit form. The admin can change this option in admin/node/configure/defaults. This patch doesn't change that. Revisions are broken for node types that have their own database structure, like polls, even when storing them as serialized objects. This patch doesn't change that, either. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 26, 2004 - 04:35 : moshe weitzman I'm guessing that someone is going to have to demonstrate that this patch performs as well as current drupal before it gets comitted. i think this patch is a few benchmarks from being comitted. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:04 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 15, 2004 - 07:05 : elias1884 please overthink the revision system default workflow as well. don't look at the revision system as an isolated system but as a part of the whole workflow system! if you combine revisions with the moderation queue the most logic default workflow would be like that: auth user creates node (revision #0) admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) => node publicly available auth user finds typo and changes node (revision #1, status = 0, moderation = 1) ------- what happens at that point at the moment is, that the node is not accessible anymore at all until the new revision is approved by admin. of course the new revision should not go online until reviewed and approved, this is absolutely correct, but there is no reason to not take the old revision offline, since it was already approved and should therefore be online until the new revision is approved. it is not practical if a node disappears only because the author corrected a typo. ------- admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) eventhough I first thought a plain boolean active field would not be capable of providing that functionality if finally came to the conclusion, that it can. The only thing to do is to not set that bit, when a new revision is created, but when it is approved (in case moderation is activated under default workflow). Every revision should have its own moderation, status and active field and on approval they are set like this (status=1, moderation=0, active=Y). When you wanna rollback to an old revision, you can chose between all revisions that already have the moderation bit set back to 0 again and the published to 1. There should be an extra permission for rollback! another concern that I have about the default workflow is, that users can't see the content, they have just created, when moderation is enabled. Eventhough, there is a big fat "submission accepted" presented after submissions, unexperienced users tend to question the information those stupid tincans give them, if they can't find their content afterwards. Many users are really lazy bastards and they don't even read the status messages. The best feedback about whether his story was submitted successfully or not of course is, if he can find the story somewhere on the site, maybe with a status message on top of it, mentioning, that the content is currently not publicly available since it has not been approved yet. there should be a my content section under my account, like somebody is trying to do with the workspace module I guess. so my suggestion is to make (status=0, moderation=1) still available for the creator under a my content section somewhere! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 24, 2004 - 06:21 : Nick Nassar I agree. The current workflow for moderation queues and revisions needs to change, but this patch isn't the place for it. The patch is already too big, and it only does the backend stuff. Instead of adding more to this patch and making it take even longer to get into core, would you mind creating a new issue for your UI suggestions, so the those changes can be added as a separate patch? Thanks, Nick ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 14:26 : Dries This patch is _much_ needed so I'd love to see someone revive it. In order for this patch to be accepted, the following needs to be done: Update this patch to CVS HEAD. Rename revid to vid. Rename node_rev to node_revisions. Rename node_rev.changed to node_revisions.timestamp. Rename $rnode to $revision. Fix the coding style to match Drupal's: proper spacing, single quotes where possible, proper variable names. Benchmark this patch with a large database with enough revisions. I'd be happy to benchmark this on my local copy of the drupal.org database. The book.log field should probably move to the node_revisions table. This can be done in a separate patch. Investigate whether transactions are well-supported. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 02:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004-r… (11.02 KB) I've worked a bit on the patch (coding style issues as mentioned by Dries). One thing I noticed is that the patch uses REPLACE. IIRC this needs to be chagned to "UPDATE, if fail INSERT" for pgsql compatibility. Nick, are you still interested in working on that patch? I'd like to know how it works on your site and work on getting it into core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 14:33 : Dries Gerhard: your patch does not apply. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 19:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org Yes, I know, that was the same version as I mailed to you earlier. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 23:02 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions.patch (52.96 KB) Ok, upüdated the patch to cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 10:58 : Dries Some more comments: db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() do not belong in database.inc, but in database.mysql.inc and database.pgsql.inc respectively. The node module calls node_revisionsision_list() which is not defined. (Fxed that on my local copy.) Do db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() deprecate Jeremy's table locking patch? The upgrade path assigns the wrong user ID to each revision. The upgrade path assigns the wrong date to each revision (that or a node's revision page shows the wrong usernames/dates). The coding style needs a bit of work, but we can worry about that later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:34 : Nick Nassar If you need any help getting those things fixed, just let me know. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:50 : Nick Nassar How this relates to Jeremy's node locking patch: There was lots of discussion, and node locking was decided against because from an end user point of view you never want a node to be locked. He's now advocating for a much simpler patch that warns users if their changes will overwrite someone elses. That patch still has a race condition, which might be fixed using db_begin_transaction(). http://drupal.org/node/6025 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 00:26 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_0.patch (55.96 KB) Here is an updated patch that tries to address Dries concerns. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 10:32 : Dries Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions-bug.png (76.06 KB) It didn't fix the aforementioned bugs. See attached screenshot. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 6, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_1.patch (51.77 KB) Ok, here is a new version. Dries and myself worked hart at it, so please have a look. what is still missing - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 23:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_2.patch (49.49 KB) Here is an updated patch. We discussed to keep the current title in node module and also in the revisiosn table. This is content duplication but will save many joins as many queries only need the title of a node. Discussion is welcome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 01:33 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_3.patch (29.93 KB) I've implemented the aforementioned solution. This makes the patch much smaller. The patch now also removes taxonomy_node_has_term() which wasn't used anywhere. I'd really apprciate if some people could test drive the patch. It will be another huge improvement for 4.6. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 02:05 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_4.patch (30 KB) Another revision. Steven didn't like my literal $node->vid in queries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 03:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. These issues are still open, btw. Especially the first one needs to be tackled. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 25, 2005 - 22:11 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_5.patch (51.13 KB) Here is a patch that has the database tables updated for forum, book, and page module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_6.patch (49.18 KB) Yet another update to keep it working with head. The patch now also removes the table definitons for the page table. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_7.patch (55.69 KB) Sorry, that was the old version, this is the right one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 21:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_8.patch (55.71 KB) Updated once more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 22:52 : Dries Anyone to help review/test this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 23:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_9.patch (49.29 KB) Updated again, the update functions occurred twice. Thanks Bart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Don't know if the db I am using is corrupted or what. I still do have some didficulties. The latest patch is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_10.patch (49.67 KB) I am probably slowly going mad ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 03:54 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_11.patch (48.95 KB) The update issue still needs investigating. This patch is updated for cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 22:20 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_12.patch (49.83 KB) Ok, here is a new version. I've solved my troubles with book.module. There are still some issues with forum module. Possibly due to inconsistent database. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 23:31 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_13.patch (49.83 KB) Turns out the drupal.org database had indeed some quirks. Please run this query in your oldest db and tell me the result: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; If you get a non-zero result we might need to add another security update. The patch could use still more testing, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 03:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_14.patch (49 KB) Ok, we are getting somewhere. At a first glance the update is working. There is a problem remaining: the revisions tab will be shown whether the node has revisions or not. Not sure we can/need to fix this. People with a drupal.org account can log in at http://killes.drupaldevs.org/revision/ and poke around. Your permissions will be the same as on drupal.org. Feel free to vreak everything but don't forget to file complaints here. (Note: this is only a pruned version of the drupal.org database with all project nodes and nodes with nids > 7000 dropped). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 06:19 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_15.patch (52.39 KB) There was some error in node_save and also the patches to the database.inc files got lost... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:07 : robertDouglass Submitting book pages doesn't work on your test site. It puts the entire content of the preview inside the body textarea. I wrote a sentence in the body and the log, and pressing preview put several lines of HTML containing both sentences in the body textarea on the preview page, plus the book page wouldn't submit. -R ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:50 : Junyor 0 results here. I started using Drupal with version 4.4, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 01:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Junyor: Thanks, that's a good sign. Maybe somebody else has an older db to try. @robertDouglass: The first effect you describe is due to drupaldevs running on PHP 5. I am unsure why the second thing does not work. In node_save() the node object has a nid although there is none in the form. Very strange. I've enabled display of db queries on the testsite. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 21:17 : dmjossel No results here on the query: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; On a database that was put in place prior to Drupal 4 and is now running on 4.5.2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 22:44 : killes(a)www.drop.org @dmjossel: thanks. @all. The strange problem I reported was apparently php 5 related. After applying Steven's php 5 patch it went away. One error is remaining: If I create a new forum topic it will be shown as part of the book on preview. Hmm, that was due to a db that got corrupted during testing so that is fixed too. Please poke around at the test site and look if you find more errors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 09:16 : Steven By the way, I just remembered that Drupal.org has some blogs lingering on in the database even though blog.module is not enabled. Perhaps this is causing troubles? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 13:22 : Anonymous I can't see why it would. Drupal.org will need extra updates for images and project nodes because those have their own tables. GK. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 6, 2005 - 14:49 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_16.patch (52.49 KB) Updated to apply to cvs again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 22, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_17.patch (49.64 KB) Updated again. All we need is a patch to upload module and an upgrade path for it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 4, 2005 - 06:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_18.patch (52.31 KB) Updated once more. Moved log field from book to node_revisions table as discussed in Antwerp. upload module still missing. We need to decide under which circumstances the log field should be displayed. Should that be added to the workflow? Should it depend on the revisions setting? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:27 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_20.patch (75.52 KB) Ok, here it is: Yet another revision of this grrrrreat patch. Changes from previous versions: - supports versioning for uploaded files. A problem is that if you delete a file, it will be gone for all revisions. - the log field is now in the node_revsions table, but each module has to decide whether to show it or not. I've implemented it for the page and the book type odes. Also, the field can be edited when adding non-book nodes to the book. The log is displayed on the revisions page and if a node is moderated. - the revisions are moved to an old_revisions table to a) get the node table smaller and b) still leave the mavailable for contrib modules that want to retreive old version data. The patch has been applied to killes.drupaldevs.org/revision where it can be tested by anybody (especially people who have "site admin" rights on drupal.org) The database is from drupal.org and you should b able to log in with your pass or simply mail yourself a new one. Gerhard ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:51 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch (59.42 KB) BTW, I marked this a bug because atm the revisions field can grow quite big. Neil has reported problems from some users who were not able to load some nodes due to to many large revisions. Also, som unrelated stuff crept into the patch. New version attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 8, 2005 - 07:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_22.patch (60.29 KB) Ok, I think I got it. Changes to last version: - uploads are no properly versioned. Missing are still pgsql checks and updates. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 10, 2005 - 18:58 : Anonymous Was able to get http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch to work with drupal-cvs.tar.gz (10 March 2005) by: - includes/database.mysql.inc: Commenting out duplicates for functions function db_begin_transaction and function db_commit_transaction - modules: node.module: Removing "'title' => $node->title," from $node_table_values variable declaration and removing "'title' => "'%s'"," from "$node_table_types" variable declaration. Happy to submit a patch if requested. I'll watch this thread. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 12, 2005 - 01:59 : killes(a)www.drop.org The duplicate function has been removed in rev 22 of this patch. Why do you think the changes in node_save are needed? Titles are saved in both tables for performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:12 : jlerner Hi - I posted comment #62. The changes to node_save appear to be needed because recent patches (both 21 and 22) remove the field 'title' from table 'node'. So without the changes to node_save, node.module is broken and generates errors. Joshua ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:29 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_23.patch (61.17 KB) Thanks, Joshua, for catching this. node:title is there to stay. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 13, 2005 - 18:29 : moshe weitzman since HEAD is open again, perhaps it is a good time to revisit this patch. once this is committed, lets address - http://drupal.org/node/11071 "node_validate does not respect group editing" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 18:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24_0.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:19 : Dries I'll commit this patch later this week! If you haven't checked this patch already, I urge you to test/check it out because it will have significant impact on existing code and modules! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:21 : Dries Also, what do people think about the n.title being duplicated? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:26 : chx I won't lose any sleep because of duplicated titles... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 20:35 : killes(a)www.drop.org Let me explain why I have chosen to duplicate the title (and also the uid): If you look at all the queries in Drupal, you will find that most of them only need the title and th uid of a node. That is, by duplicating it, we save expensive joins on the node_revisions table. Due to this fact, this patch is actually a performance improvement. A note about updating contrib module: Strictly speaking they wouldn't need to be updated. They only need to if their authors decide that their info should be available for revisioning. The upgrade path for forum.module in my update.inc patch (+ the forum patch) should show you what needs to be done. I will write a note for the update page once the patch hits core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2005 - 23:21 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch (60.38 KB) Updated to cvs. Dries: Based on some remarks in #drupal this is the last update I am going to do. Apply it or won't fix it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 05:42 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch.patch (528 bytes) That's a big patch. I've only started looking through it. I noticed one little typo, affecting updates. A patch to your last patch is attached. I'm running with the revision patch on my dev server now happily. I like the concept. What happens if you click 'stop' on your browser in the middle of a MySQL "transaction"? I assume that kills the connection to MySQL, and the lock is freed? But this then leaves changes only partially applied? What exactly does locking/unlocking the tables buy us in MySQL? I don't see anywhere that we detect if an apply fails part way through, and thus roll back...? What am I missing? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 09:11 : Dries Jeremy: many of us are worried about the performance ramifications this patch introduces. Early experiments showed a small performance improvement (while a performance regression might be expected). More performance reports from large sites like kerneltrap.org will certainly help this patch. Mind to do a quick performance comparision and to report back with some numbers? Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 14:38 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Dries: I'm not running HEAD on kerneltrap, so this really isn't a possibility. Furthermore, until I understand why we're locking tables, I don't like it. The idea of revisions in their own tables is great. The idea of locking tables to get (without any obvious benefit) there really worries me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 16:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Jeremy: Thanks for looking at the patch! Also for catching the typo. :) Did you try to upgrade your database? If yes, how did it go? One of Dries' concerns is the complexity of the upgrade. How many nodes and revisions did the db have? About database locking: This part of the patch was created by Nick and I simply continued to use it. Maybe the code should rather be: if(db_begin_transaction(array('{node}', '{node_revisions}', '{watchdog}', '{sessions}', '{files}'))) { db_query($node_query, $node_table_values); db_query($revisions_query, $revisions_table_values); db_commit_transaction(); ... } The idea is probably to avoid two updates at the same time. I don't think the locking helps if you abort the script at an inconvenient time. Rollbacks aren't implemented in all mysql versions. We could omit the db locking if deemed inappropriate. Maybe Nick can explain his ideas behind this. @Dries: I wonder who the "many of us" are. They certainly haven't spoken to me. Moshe had some reservations about the upgrade path and project module, but the time that project module abused revisions to store issue updates was long ago and his reservations were resolved. Nobody else (besides you of course and now Jeremy) has voiced reservations in a way that was audible to me. If you grep through the patch you will notice that there are only four queries which have a join on the node_revisions table. Two of them are in node_load and in the other cases the join replaced a join on the node table. The two queries in node_load are the only ones that have both a join on the node and the revisions query. Thus, loading of individual nodes might become somewhat slower. All other queries will be faster since the node table is now much smaller. Also, node loading does not have to be slower, it depends on your node table. If you had a lot of revisions and thus a large table, then the new scheme will make your queries actually faster since we do not load the revisions on each and every node load anymore. If you didn't have many revisions your node_load migth be somewhat slower. WRT to the update script Karoly pointed out that we could use multiple insert queries instead one query per revision. This would probably make the update somewhat faster. I am willing to work on this iff you declare that you will commit the patch afterwards. I'd need to know if this will work on pgsql and on all supported mysql versions before I work on it. About locking: Database locking is dog slow, at least on mysql. I was using locks in an earlier version of the upgrade script but had to remove it for (serious!) performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 17:07 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_26.patch (46.45 KB) Ok, another update, cause I need it myself. I've left out the transaction stuff for now. It is in principle unrelated to this patch and should be discussed elsewhere. This also makes the patch smaller and easier to review (hint, hint). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_27.patch (39.05 KB) The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 23:23 : Dries Got one error during the upgrade path: ALTER TABLE {book} ADD PRIMARY KEY vid (vid) FAILED

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[drupal-devel] [bug] Put revisions in their own table
by Dries 09 May '05

09 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/7582 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: node system Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: killes(a)www.drop.org Reported by: killes(a)www.drop.org Updated by: Dries Status: patch Got one error during the upgrade path: ALTER TABLE {book} ADD PRIMARY KEY vid (vid) FAILED Dries Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 18:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Currently all node revisions are stored in a serialized field in node.table and retrieved for _each_ page view although they are rarely needed. However, we have agreed that serializing data is bad and that we should try to keep the memory foot print pf Drupal small. Therefore I propose to create a separate revisions table which would be in principle identical to the node table, only that it could have several old copies of the same node. Extra data added by other modules could be added in a serialized field unless we find a better solution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:06 : jhriggs I too think the serialized approach is less than desirable, but here's an alternative. This would likely take some considerable rework in core and contrib, but the following is how we handle similar types of situations in our databases at work. It is more elegant that a separate table, and avoids the (almost exact) duplication of a table. Instead of separate tables, keep all revisions of nodes in the node table as follows: * add field: active (0/1 or Y/N) * add field: revision * every revision of a node is stored in the node table; however, only one revision can be active at any given time * nid can no longer be unique -- primary/unique key becomes (nid, active) * any time a node is loaded, updated (without revision), etc., the active version is used. Thoughts? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 19:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org I am not opposed to your scheme, but I want to stress the following: * Duplicating a table's structure is not bad (IMHO) as long as the content is different. * having two tables will allow us to have a rather small node table. This is (maybe) a performance gain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2004 - 20:37 : jhriggs I don't necessarily think that duplicating a table's structure is _bad_. It just seems to be wasteful and a pain to maintain. (Every change to the node table is made twice...easy to do, but also easy to miss perhaps.) As for performance, as long as nid and the active indicator are indexed, there shouldn't be any performance loss. Also, archiving an old version when making a new revision will be much simpler: just change the active indicator rather than copying an entire node to another table (and ensuring everything gets copied...again a potential maintainance issue). To be honest, I would just like to see the serialized data go away, regarless of what approach is taken. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:49 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_07-30-2004.p… (10.47 KB) I'm interested in using Drupal for a large scale wiki-type project. In order to do this, I need revisions to be in their own table. Attached is a patch to do just that. Most of the changes are pretty self explanatory. Spreading out node data across two tables meant that I had to add database functions to do locking/transactions. Without this, race conditions in which the database becomes corrupted are possible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 30, 2004 - 21:54 : Nick Nassar Oh yeah... The patch is a diff against Drupal CVS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 02:00 : Anonymous Gerhard speaking. Nick, thanks a lot for your nice patch! It saves me a great deal of labour. I looked through it and immediately liked it. You not only put the old revisions into a new table but also the current one. Do you have an estimate how much more expensive the additional join is? Besides a few minor coding style issues I found a major one: Just a few hours before you uploaded your patch JonBob's node access patch hit core. That means your patch won't apply anymore as all the queries you change have been changed. Can I bug you to update your patch? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 03:11 : Anonymous Also I think that your upgrade path loses existing revisions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 04:39 : drumm I think this is the proper way to do things. No columns are duplicated, there is no serialized data, and only the fields that are logically revised are stored. Nothing jumped out at me as a way to have my node modules be able to keep a table of revisions of additional fields. I'm guessing this could be done within the confines of _insert and _update. Assuming the upgrade path works and modules can extend it I give it a +1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 31, 2004 - 16:40 : Nick Nassar It figures that just as I finish a big patch, another patch comes along and breaks it. Oh well, it should be a pretty easy to fix. I'll work on it. Fixing the upgrade path to keep revisions should be fairly painless. I found another issue that needs to be fixed before this patch gets merged. There format of a node needs to be stored for each revision. Otherwise, for modules that store a format for the nodes, such as page and book, if you write one revision in PHP and the next in HTML, the PHP revision will be displayed as HTML. This is part of a larger issue of how node modules should store revisions of additional fields. I think each module that wants to do this should create another table with (nid, revid) as the primary key. Just as when they want to add fields to a node they create another table with nid as the primary key. As far as performance goes, for sites that make heavy use of revisions, an extra join on primary keys is going to be a lot faster than grabbing all of the revisions from that database everytime. We would need to run benchmarks to determine is the overall difference in speed is for an average site is a gain or a loss. I'm guessing it's very minor either way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 15:55 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_08-23-2004.p… (10.92 KB) Here's an updated patch against CVS that puts revisions in their own table, provides an upgrade path, and fixes the format related bugs in the last patch. Hopefully, this can make it into CVS as soon as the freeze is over. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 16:10 : moshe weitzman Interesting patch ... drumm's question is still outstanding. how do modules store revisions of their fields? Are they expected to manage this on their own? Thats not how it works today. As an aside, i am seeing profile_ fields in my node.revisions column. One could argue that those need not be saved. They pertain to the node author, not to the node itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 18:14 : Nick Nassar Having modules be responsible for storing revisions of their own fields is a side-effect of storing revision data in tables. There's really no way around it. However, revisions generally don't make sense for node types that don't have PHP/HTML content, such as polls. I think it's going to be a pretty rare scenario for a new node type to want another field to change per-revision, so it's a pretty good trade-off. Storing fields that shouldn't be part of revisions, such as the profile_ fields, is a side-effect of storing revisions as serialized objects. Applying this patch will free up that wasted space. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 19:20 : Anonymous There should be a hook that let's the module choose whether it supports history. This way a module author can prevent the user from doing something that may break his module or just cause undefined behavior. If the module doesn't support history then don't let the user/admin choose to add history to nodes of that type. Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 23, 2004 - 21:23 : Nick Nassar I agree, there should be an API change to make specifying support for revisions easier. In the interests of keeping patches small and keeping to one change per patch, I think the API change should be a separate issue. A sort of ad-hoc API to decide whether or not a module supports revisions by default already exists. Instead of having a hook, modules set the default value of the "Create new revision" field in the edit form. The admin can change this option in admin/node/configure/defaults. This patch doesn't change that. Revisions are broken for node types that have their own database structure, like polls, even when storing them as serialized objects. This patch doesn't change that, either. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 26, 2004 - 04:35 : moshe weitzman I'm guessing that someone is going to have to demonstrate that this patch performs as well as current drupal before it gets comitted. i think this patch is a few benchmarks from being comitted. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:04 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 03:05 : Nick Nassar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004.p… (11 KB) I ran some really unscientific benchmarks, and it looks like this patch has a negligible affect on performance. I used apache bench and the database from theregular.org, which doesn't contain any revisions (worst case scenario for this patch) and contains several hundred nodes. Both the patched and unpatched versions hovered between 2.36 and 2.38 requests per second. The command I used was: ab -n50 -C 'PHPSESSID=b01a9f92880ef215b0ed6f1314a5eba2' http://192.168.0.100/ An updated patch that should apply to CVS is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 15, 2004 - 07:05 : elias1884 please overthink the revision system default workflow as well. don't look at the revision system as an isolated system but as a part of the whole workflow system! if you combine revisions with the moderation queue the most logic default workflow would be like that: auth user creates node (revision #0) admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) => node publicly available auth user finds typo and changes node (revision #1, status = 0, moderation = 1) ------- what happens at that point at the moment is, that the node is not accessible anymore at all until the new revision is approved by admin. of course the new revision should not go online until reviewed and approved, this is absolutely correct, but there is no reason to not take the old revision offline, since it was already approved and should therefore be online until the new revision is approved. it is not practical if a node disappears only because the author corrected a typo. ------- admin approves the node (status = 1, moderation = 0) eventhough I first thought a plain boolean active field would not be capable of providing that functionality if finally came to the conclusion, that it can. The only thing to do is to not set that bit, when a new revision is created, but when it is approved (in case moderation is activated under default workflow). Every revision should have its own moderation, status and active field and on approval they are set like this (status=1, moderation=0, active=Y). When you wanna rollback to an old revision, you can chose between all revisions that already have the moderation bit set back to 0 again and the published to 1. There should be an extra permission for rollback! another concern that I have about the default workflow is, that users can't see the content, they have just created, when moderation is enabled. Eventhough, there is a big fat "submission accepted" presented after submissions, unexperienced users tend to question the information those stupid tincans give them, if they can't find their content afterwards. Many users are really lazy bastards and they don't even read the status messages. The best feedback about whether his story was submitted successfully or not of course is, if he can find the story somewhere on the site, maybe with a status message on top of it, mentioning, that the content is currently not publicly available since it has not been approved yet. there should be a my content section under my account, like somebody is trying to do with the workspace module I guess. so my suggestion is to make (status=0, moderation=1) still available for the creator under a my content section somewhere! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 24, 2004 - 06:21 : Nick Nassar I agree. The current workflow for moderation queues and revisions needs to change, but this patch isn't the place for it. The patch is already too big, and it only does the backend stuff. Instead of adding more to this patch and making it take even longer to get into core, would you mind creating a new issue for your UI suggestions, so the those changes can be added as a separate patch? Thanks, Nick ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 14:26 : Dries This patch is _much_ needed so I'd love to see someone revive it. In order for this patch to be accepted, the following needs to be done: Update this patch to CVS HEAD. Rename revid to vid. Rename node_rev to node_revisions. Rename node_rev.changed to node_revisions.timestamp. Rename $rnode to $revision. Fix the coding style to match Drupal's: proper spacing, single quotes where possible, proper variable names. Benchmark this patch with a large database with enough revisions. I'd be happy to benchmark this on my local copy of the drupal.org database. The book.log field should probably move to the node_revisions table. This can be done in a separate patch. Investigate whether transactions are well-supported. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 02:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Drupal-Improved_Revision_Schema_10-26-2004-r… (11.02 KB) I've worked a bit on the patch (coding style issues as mentioned by Dries). One thing I noticed is that the patch uses REPLACE. IIRC this needs to be chagned to "UPDATE, if fail INSERT" for pgsql compatibility. Nick, are you still interested in working on that patch? I'd like to know how it works on your site and work on getting it into core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 14:33 : Dries Gerhard: your patch does not apply. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 19:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org Yes, I know, that was the same version as I mailed to you earlier. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 23:02 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions.patch (52.96 KB) Ok, upüdated the patch to cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 10:58 : Dries Some more comments: db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() do not belong in database.inc, but in database.mysql.inc and database.pgsql.inc respectively. The node module calls node_revisionsision_list() which is not defined. (Fxed that on my local copy.) Do db_begin_transaction() and db_end_transaction() deprecate Jeremy's table locking patch? The upgrade path assigns the wrong user ID to each revision. The upgrade path assigns the wrong date to each revision (that or a node's revision page shows the wrong usernames/dates). The coding style needs a bit of work, but we can worry about that later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:34 : Nick Nassar If you need any help getting those things fixed, just let me know. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 19:50 : Nick Nassar How this relates to Jeremy's node locking patch: There was lots of discussion, and node locking was decided against because from an end user point of view you never want a node to be locked. He's now advocating for a much simpler patch that warns users if their changes will overwrite someone elses. That patch still has a race condition, which might be fixed using db_begin_transaction(). http://drupal.org/node/6025 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 00:26 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_0.patch (55.96 KB) Here is an updated patch that tries to address Dries concerns. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 10:32 : Dries Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions-bug.png (76.06 KB) It didn't fix the aforementioned bugs. See attached screenshot. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 6, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_1.patch (51.77 KB) Ok, here is a new version. Dries and myself worked hart at it, so please have a look. what is still missing - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 23:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_2.patch (49.49 KB) Here is an updated patch. We discussed to keep the current title in node module and also in the revisiosn table. This is content duplication but will save many joins as many queries only need the title of a node. Discussion is welcome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 01:33 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_3.patch (29.93 KB) I've implemented the aforementioned solution. This makes the patch much smaller. The patch now also removes taxonomy_node_has_term() which wasn't used anywhere. I'd really apprciate if some people could test drive the patch. It will be another huge improvement for 4.6. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 02:05 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_4.patch (30 KB) Another revision. Steven didn't like my literal $node->vid in queries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 03:10 : killes(a)www.drop.org - database upgrades for the core modules with an own table - contrib modules need an upgrade too. - do we need nid and vid in both the node and the node_revisions table? - the amount of sql queries means a good stress testing for large databases. These issues are still open, btw. Especially the first one needs to be tackled. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 25, 2005 - 22:11 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_5.patch (51.13 KB) Here is a patch that has the database tables updated for forum, book, and page module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_6.patch (49.18 KB) Yet another update to keep it working with head. The patch now also removes the table definitons for the page table. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 30, 2005 - 00:57 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_7.patch (55.69 KB) Sorry, that was the old version, this is the right one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 21:55 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_8.patch (55.71 KB) Updated once more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 22:52 : Dries Anyone to help review/test this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 31, 2005 - 23:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_9.patch (49.29 KB) Updated again, the update functions occurred twice. Thanks Bart. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Don't know if the db I am using is corrupted or what. I still do have some didficulties. The latest patch is attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 02:27 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_10.patch (49.67 KB) I am probably slowly going mad ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 03:54 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_11.patch (48.95 KB) The update issue still needs investigating. This patch is updated for cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 22:20 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_12.patch (49.83 KB) Ok, here is a new version. I've solved my troubles with book.module. There are still some issues with forum module. Possibly due to inconsistent database. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 2, 2005 - 23:31 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_13.patch (49.83 KB) Turns out the drupal.org database had indeed some quirks. Please run this query in your oldest db and tell me the result: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; If you get a non-zero result we might need to add another security update. The patch could use still more testing, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 03:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_14.patch (49 KB) Ok, we are getting somewhere. At a first glance the update is working. There is a problem remaining: the revisions tab will be shown whether the node has revisions or not. Not sure we can/need to fix this. People with a drupal.org account can log in at http://killes.drupaldevs.org/revision/ and poke around. Your permissions will be the same as on drupal.org. Feel free to vreak everything but don't forget to file complaints here. (Note: this is only a pruned version of the drupal.org database with all project nodes and nodes with nids > 7000 dropped). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 06:19 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_15.patch (52.39 KB) There was some error in node_save and also the patches to the database.inc files got lost... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:07 : robertDouglass Submitting book pages doesn't work on your test site. It puts the entire content of the preview inside the body textarea. I wrote a sentence in the body and the log, and pressing preview put several lines of HTML containing both sentences in the body textarea on the preview page, plus the book page wouldn't submit. -R ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 09:50 : Junyor 0 results here. I started using Drupal with version 4.4, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 01:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Junyor: Thanks, that's a good sign. Maybe somebody else has an older db to try. @robertDouglass: The first effect you describe is due to drupaldevs running on PHP 5. I am unsure why the second thing does not work. In node_save() the node object has a nid although there is none in the form. Very strange. I've enabled display of db queries on the testsite. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 21:17 : dmjossel No results here on the query: select nid,type from node where type like '%/%'; On a database that was put in place prior to Drupal 4 and is now running on 4.5.2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 4, 2005 - 22:44 : killes(a)www.drop.org @dmjossel: thanks. @all. The strange problem I reported was apparently php 5 related. After applying Steven's php 5 patch it went away. One error is remaining: If I create a new forum topic it will be shown as part of the book on preview. Hmm, that was due to a db that got corrupted during testing so that is fixed too. Please poke around at the test site and look if you find more errors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 09:16 : Steven By the way, I just remembered that Drupal.org has some blogs lingering on in the database even though blog.module is not enabled. Perhaps this is causing troubles? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 5, 2005 - 13:22 : Anonymous I can't see why it would. Drupal.org will need extra updates for images and project nodes because those have their own tables. GK. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 6, 2005 - 14:49 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_16.patch (52.49 KB) Updated to apply to cvs again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 22, 2005 - 22:15 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_17.patch (49.64 KB) Updated again. All we need is a patch to upload module and an upgrade path for it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 4, 2005 - 06:22 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_18.patch (52.31 KB) Updated once more. Moved log field from book to node_revisions table as discussed in Antwerp. upload module still missing. We need to decide under which circumstances the log field should be displayed. Should that be added to the workflow? Should it depend on the revisions setting? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:27 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_20.patch (75.52 KB) Ok, here it is: Yet another revision of this grrrrreat patch. Changes from previous versions: - supports versioning for uploaded files. A problem is that if you delete a file, it will be gone for all revisions. - the log field is now in the node_revsions table, but each module has to decide whether to show it or not. I've implemented it for the page and the book type odes. Also, the field can be edited when adding non-book nodes to the book. The log is displayed on the revisions page and if a node is moderated. - the revisions are moved to an old_revisions table to a) get the node table smaller and b) still leave the mavailable for contrib modules that want to retreive old version data. The patch has been applied to killes.drupaldevs.org/revision where it can be tested by anybody (especially people who have "site admin" rights on drupal.org) The database is from drupal.org and you should b able to log in with your pass or simply mail yourself a new one. Gerhard ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 5, 2005 - 21:51 : Anonymous Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch (59.42 KB) BTW, I marked this a bug because atm the revisions field can grow quite big. Neil has reported problems from some users who were not able to load some nodes due to to many large revisions. Also, som unrelated stuff crept into the patch. New version attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 8, 2005 - 07:56 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_22.patch (60.29 KB) Ok, I think I got it. Changes to last version: - uploads are no properly versioned. Missing are still pgsql checks and updates. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 10, 2005 - 18:58 : Anonymous Was able to get http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_21.patch to work with drupal-cvs.tar.gz (10 March 2005) by: - includes/database.mysql.inc: Commenting out duplicates for functions function db_begin_transaction and function db_commit_transaction - modules: node.module: Removing "'title' => $node->title," from $node_table_values variable declaration and removing "'title' => "'%s'"," from "$node_table_types" variable declaration. Happy to submit a patch if requested. I'll watch this thread. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 12, 2005 - 01:59 : killes(a)www.drop.org The duplicate function has been removed in rev 22 of this patch. Why do you think the changes in node_save are needed? Titles are saved in both tables for performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:12 : jlerner Hi - I posted comment #62. The changes to node_save appear to be needed because recent patches (both 21 and 22) remove the field 'title' from table 'node'. So without the changes to node_save, node.module is broken and generates errors. Joshua ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:29 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_23.patch (61.17 KB) Thanks, Joshua, for catching this. node:title is there to stay. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 13, 2005 - 18:29 : moshe weitzman since HEAD is open again, perhaps it is a good time to revisit this patch. once this is committed, lets address - http://drupal.org/node/11071 "node_validate does not respect group editing" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:43 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 18:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_24_0.patch (60.39 KB) Updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:19 : Dries I'll commit this patch later this week! If you haven't checked this patch already, I urge you to test/check it out because it will have significant impact on existing code and modules! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:21 : Dries Also, what do people think about the n.title being duplicated? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 07:26 : chx I won't lose any sleep because of duplicated titles... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 19, 2005 - 20:35 : killes(a)www.drop.org Let me explain why I have chosen to duplicate the title (and also the uid): If you look at all the queries in Drupal, you will find that most of them only need the title and th uid of a node. That is, by duplicating it, we save expensive joins on the node_revisions table. Due to this fact, this patch is actually a performance improvement. A note about updating contrib module: Strictly speaking they wouldn't need to be updated. They only need to if their authors decide that their info should be available for revisioning. The upgrade path for forum.module in my update.inc patch (+ the forum patch) should show you what needs to be done. I will write a note for the update page once the patch hits core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2005 - 23:21 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch (60.38 KB) Updated to cvs. Dries: Based on some remarks in #drupal this is the last update I am going to do. Apply it or won't fix it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 05:42 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_25.patch.patch (528 bytes) That's a big patch. I've only started looking through it. I noticed one little typo, affecting updates. A patch to your last patch is attached. I'm running with the revision patch on my dev server now happily. I like the concept. What happens if you click 'stop' on your browser in the middle of a MySQL "transaction"? I assume that kills the connection to MySQL, and the lock is freed? But this then leaves changes only partially applied? What exactly does locking/unlocking the tables buy us in MySQL? I don't see anywhere that we detect if an apply fails part way through, and thus roll back...? What am I missing? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 09:11 : Dries Jeremy: many of us are worried about the performance ramifications this patch introduces. Early experiments showed a small performance improvement (while a performance regression might be expected). More performance reports from large sites like kerneltrap.org will certainly help this patch. Mind to do a quick performance comparision and to report back with some numbers? Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 14:38 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Dries: I'm not running HEAD on kerneltrap, so this really isn't a possibility. Furthermore, until I understand why we're locking tables, I don't like it. The idea of revisions in their own tables is great. The idea of locking tables to get (without any obvious benefit) there really worries me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 30, 2005 - 16:16 : killes(a)www.drop.org @Jeremy: Thanks for looking at the patch! Also for catching the typo. :) Did you try to upgrade your database? If yes, how did it go? One of Dries' concerns is the complexity of the upgrade. How many nodes and revisions did the db have? About database locking: This part of the patch was created by Nick and I simply continued to use it. Maybe the code should rather be: if(db_begin_transaction(array('{node}', '{node_revisions}', '{watchdog}', '{sessions}', '{files}'))) { db_query($node_query, $node_table_values); db_query($revisions_query, $revisions_table_values); db_commit_transaction(); ... } The idea is probably to avoid two updates at the same time. I don't think the locking helps if you abort the script at an inconvenient time. Rollbacks aren't implemented in all mysql versions. We could omit the db locking if deemed inappropriate. Maybe Nick can explain his ideas behind this. @Dries: I wonder who the "many of us" are. They certainly haven't spoken to me. Moshe had some reservations about the upgrade path and project module, but the time that project module abused revisions to store issue updates was long ago and his reservations were resolved. Nobody else (besides you of course and now Jeremy) has voiced reservations in a way that was audible to me. If you grep through the patch you will notice that there are only four queries which have a join on the node_revisions table. Two of them are in node_load and in the other cases the join replaced a join on the node table. The two queries in node_load are the only ones that have both a join on the node and the revisions query. Thus, loading of individual nodes might become somewhat slower. All other queries will be faster since the node table is now much smaller. Also, node loading does not have to be slower, it depends on your node table. If you had a lot of revisions and thus a large table, then the new scheme will make your queries actually faster since we do not load the revisions on each and every node load anymore. If you didn't have many revisions your node_load migth be somewhat slower. WRT to the update script Karoly pointed out that we could use multiple insert queries instead one query per revision. This would probably make the update somewhat faster. I am willing to work on this iff you declare that you will commit the patch afterwards. I'd need to know if this will work on pgsql and on all supported mysql versions before I work on it. About locking: Database locking is dog slow, at least on mysql. I was using locks in an earlier version of the upgrade script but had to remove it for (serious!) performance reasons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 17:07 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_26.patch (46.45 KB) Ok, another update, cause I need it myself. I've left out the transaction stuff for now. It is in principle unrelated to this patch and should be discussed elsewhere. This also makes the patch smaller and easier to review (hint, hint). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch contained the update functions twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:32 : killes(a)www.drop.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/revisions_27.patch (39.05 KB) The patch contained the update functions twice.

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[drupal-devel] [feature] Enable multiple block regions (not just "left" and "right" sidebars)
by Bèr Kessels 09 May '05

09 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/16216 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: block.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: paragkenia Updated by: Bèr Kessels Status: patch Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/more_regions_principle.png (123.29 KB) attached is a schematic which might clarify this a little. And I would also like to comment on me being the UI leader: I do not consider myself any leader, no ofeence, though. Just to clarify that. Bèr Kessels Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 26, 2005 - 11:27 : paragkenia I read the comparision discussion between *Drupal* and *Mambo*. In several messages it was outlined that Drupal can place blocks only in right and left and not flexible to put them on anywhere where one want. It will be great if this can be changed in upcoming versions. I am no pro at PHP, so don't know how much time this task will take, but I think it is very important. parag ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2005 - 02:44 : nedjo This issue was apparently partially addressed in issue http://drupal.org/node/19694 [1]. [1] http://drupal.org/node/19694 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 01:24 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions.patch (8.17 KB) This much-requested functionality - to have the ability to place blocks in more than the two predefined regions - was partially addressed in issue http://drupal.org/node/19694. [2]. But "blocks" are still limited to the "left" and "right" sidebars (hard-coded in block.module). This patch is a first step designed to enable multiple (eventually, admin-definable) regions for blocks. I've moved the existing "left" and "right" block regions to a 'region' table (with ids of 0 and 1, as currently used in themes). Then all references to the regions are drawn dynamically from the table. This way, if further records are added, they will appear in the list of available regions for block placement. Doing this actually reduces some duplicated code, since it's no longer necessary to repeat code blocks for each of "left" and "right". As it stands, the patch doesn't add any new functionality--but I don't think it breaks anything either. New functionality would need (a) new regions defined, and (b) changes to themes. A simple first step might be, e.g., to add a "footer" region and then add a call in the footer generation to append any blocks assigned to the footer region there. I'm setting this to patch, but I'm aware that it needs some discussion and refining before it'll be ready to apply. [2] http://drupal.org/node/19694. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 02:05 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block_regions.png (5.65 KB) Here's a screenshot showing the block admin page, with drop-downs for region placement (the options are dynamically generated based on defined regions). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 03:57 : adrian The biggest problem with this is that you can have multiple themes, and each of these themes can have different regions available. Also, the method of defining which regions are available needs to be standardised. Some of the work that me and Vlado are working on for the install system would go towards solving that problem (ie: meta information for modules, themes and styles). This has been discussed to death, but the general consensus has been that we _want_ to do this, but we need to solve a few other problems properly first, the most pertinent being the interface issue. Chris (factoryjoe) recently did a whole mess of workflows for something related to this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 05:09 : syscrusher The first paragraph of adrian [3]'s post is a point that occurred to me also, as I read this thread. One suggestion would be to separate the definition and configuration of blocks, on one hand, from the placement of those blocks, on the other hand. In other words, Drupal core provides a mechanism defining what blocks exist, which of these are on by default or off by default and user-selectable vs. which are forced on for all users, and the configuration (if applicable) of specialized blocks defined by particular modules. Each theme provides a standard hook function that returns an array of region names and help/description text, e.g., array('left'=>t('This vertical region is left of the main content area'), 'right'=>t('This vertical region is right of the main content area'), 'footer'=>t('The footer is below the left, right, and main content areas of the page')). The theme part of Drupal core (i.e., theme.module itself, not the individual themes) provides a standard UI that is displayed within config of *each theme* (but is one physical code base within theme.module) that allows the administrator to map blocks defined by Drupal core into regions defined by the theme, and storing that mapping as an theme-to-block_ID-to-region_ID (with weight) table in the database. From there, the actual page rendering is similar to what's being done now, but there is more of it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the key to solving this problem is breaking it along its degrees of orthogonality, and there are three -- two in Drupal core and one in the individual theme. Scott [3] http://drupal.org//user/1517 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 08:14 : Dries Scott, is right. The theme should export its available regions. Then the administrator's task is to assign blocks to regions (not to setup regions). A theme could have configurable regions, but that internal to the theme. To me, the real challenge is the UI and the interaction design. Configuring blocks could easily become a real pain (while most themes continue to use 'left' and 'right'.) Of course, we can implement all the functionality, default everything to 'left' and 'right', and worry about the UI later. This should be fairly straightforward to implement and nedjo's patch looks like a first step in the right direction. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 22:09 : nedjo I agree with the suggested approach of themes registering their regions. I'd see this happening when a particular theme is activiated (or upgraded). Regions would be an array of names (e.g., 'left', 'right', 'footer'). New records would be created in the region table only for region names not previously registered. Some areas I'm not clear on, or that need further work: Table naming Should a new table be 'region' or 'regions' (I've used 'region')? I don't see a convention among existing table names, some of which are singular and others plural. Default values I've kept the existing '0' and '1' ids for regions (left and right, respectively), for backward compatibility. But this means we can't use autoincrement for the region id (rid), since autoincrements seem to begin with 1. Likely we should change to autogenerated ids. Initial records Using the INSERT INTO statements as I've done for the initial region entries is probably counterproductive, since sooner or later they'll have to be dynamically generated. I was hoping this could be a preliminary patch, with the main work coming later, but likely we need to solve region registration by themes before this patch is applied. I don't have a good idea of how region registration by themes would be implemented (a hook on theme activation?), and invite suggestions or implementations. Theme system changes Besides region registration, the other change I'm seeing that would be needed in the theme system is loading blocks by region name, rather than region id. This is because the ids currently used ('0' and '1') in theory might be diffferent on a particular install. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 22:18 : syscrusher Instead of having themes "register" their regions, why not just add a theme API hook called them_regions() that returns an associative array of $region_name=>t($region_helptext)? This would be in keeping with other similar API functions, such as those that return what permissions apply to a module or what node types are defined by a module. Most themes are going to define only a small number of regions (two being the typical case now, but I could see five or six in a complex theme), so returning a constant array will be faster than querying SQL to obtain an array of rows. There could be (optionally, at the discretion of whoever builds this thing) another API hook like theme_region_properties($region_name) that returns an associative array with detailed info for a given region, such as extended help text with recommended usage instructions for the region. Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 22:19 : syscrusher s/them_regions/theme_regions/g ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 23:47 : adrian Because. The most common 'theme' is a phptemplate theme. And there needs to be a generic method for specifying the regions available, in a non hook_function format.. Themes get their names from the directory in which they are contained.. when copying the theme to another directory, there must be _no_ modifications necessary to allow normal usage. This is one of the tenets of the new template system I designed. You would need a standard way to define meta-information for themes, that does not need to be modified when copied to a new directory. We are working on this in the install system work, as you need a way external of Drupal to define the module dependencies and some other things. My approach would be to add a theme.dsc text file to the directory, which would allow you to specify meta-information. For instance : ---- regions: left, right, footer, center, mountie author: Johnny McAngstyPants ---- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 03:00 : syscrusher Adrian wrote: " Themes get their names from the directory in which they are contained.. when copying the theme to another directory, there must be _no_ modifications necessary to allow normal usage. This is one of the tenets of the new template system I designed. " A very good point. But region names don't have to be unique across different themes, so my hook function wouldn't have to be modified. The suggestion I made for the mapping metadata was three factors: theme ID or name, region ID or name, and block ID (plus one non-key weight value to order the blocks within a region, but this is not relevant here). I'm not familiar enough with PHP template to be able to respond to your comments on that one, so if you say it's not feasible to work with my schema, then I'll take your word for it. :-) Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 03:03 : syscrusher Oh, wait.....I see now what you mean! It's not the output of the function that is the problem, but the *name* of the function. Never mind. I concede your point. Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 08:44 : Jaza I'm probably jumping ahead a bit here... but something that this patch will have to eventually account for, is how to allow regions to be defined as inline. Allowing a theme to define a region's position as being anywhere on the edge of the page (i.e. top, left, right, bottom, corners, etc) is relatively easy. But what about having a region that's in the middle of a node's body, or somewhere else that's not the edge of the page? What I'm thinking of, is eventually allowing the custom region system to integrate with the CCK. Like I said, I admit that I'm jumping ahead into the future - the CCK still has a long way to go before it's ready. But ultimately, it would be cool if a theme could define a region as being after, say, the "rating" field in nodes of type "movie review". This would make the region (and the blocks in it) truly inline and in context with the actual content of the node. This would be a huge step forward compared to the current block system, which doesn't allow you to mix the presentation of blocks and nodes at all. In Drupal ATM, blocks and "the rest of the page" are totally separate, and really you have no choice but to display them as such. The result of this is that information in blocks that really should be displayed as part of a node, gets literally "pushed to the side", and always seems secondary to the actual content. Often the block has content that is just as important as the content of the node itself. Another option (of less merit, IMO - because of the extra maintenance work, and lack of enforced consistency) would be to have a region filter. You could then choose where to place an inline region on a per-node basis, by entering text such as [region:2] (example based on image_filter syntax) into the node body. Anyway, just thought I'd throw that idea into the open. I don't expect it will be implemented any time soon, but it's something to think about. Jeremy ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 09:54 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png (1.29 KB) Imo the 'regions' are more than you guys name here.. FOr example I attached 2 screens which only shows you the regions.. What I think is that it should always be possible to have free names for the regions. No matter if i call - the region where my content appears in - 'content' or 'site items'.. See attached screens.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 09:56 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-2.png (1.39 KB) And the second... See these links: - http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png - http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-2.png ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 16:22 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions2.patch (13.39 KB) Here's a revised patch implementing some of the ideas so far. I've used the theme engine - rather than individual themes - to generate the list of available regions. I know this isn't ideal, but e.g. for xtemplate it's at present the only option--no logic is possible in the individual theme. region is changed to a varchar field from the current tinyint. I've roughed in several regions--really just for demo purposes. More thought and work would be needed to refine them (e.g., styling, etc.). But this maybe moves the conversation forward. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 22:26 : Dries This patch enables different regions to be used. That is a good thing. The next question is: should we take into account that different themes could assign blocks to different regions? Lots of problems would be solved if (i) there could only be one active theme on a website or (ii) if all themes would have a common set of regions. (This "let users select their own theme"-thing is a left-over from the early days, except for WAP stuff maybe.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 22:37 : killes(a)www.drop.org Giving up multiple theme support would be a great thing. People could still select from multiple style sheets. WAP shoud not be a user preference setting, but automatically detected and redirected to a special site with a WAP theme. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 22:48 : adrian You would then lose the ability to make a special front page theme for use with the sections module, for instance. Also, currently styles exist in the same namespace as themes, and we would have to make more a distinction of styles vs templates (or themes), but I do think this could help simplify things. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 17:54 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions3.patch (15.69 KB) The main issue raised, if I'm understanding well: if a theme or theme engine is present that offers regions other than those available in the default theme, any blocks assigned to those regions will be invisible to most users. Here's a revised patch addressing the concern. I've added a test for each region to see whether it's also available in the current default theme. (Actually, I'm realizing as I write this, I've used the theme engine--so it would need to be updated to test first if an engine is being used.) In any case, any regions not available by default are starred, and a message text appears (only if necessary). If there's support for the approach, I'd be happy to finish the patch. Remaining work: * extend to work with non-engine themes * finalize base set of regions to implement * implement common region set in all core themes (for now I've only done xtemplate) * work on CSS display (how blocks in each region should look) This last point I'm not too confident on and would look for help/suggestions. Screenshot to come. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 17:56 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block_regions_message.png (12.34 KB) Screenshot showing starring of non-default regions plus message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 18:19 : killes(a)www.drop.org I like that approach. +1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 18:23 : resmini My two cents. If this has to be done (and it should), better get rid of spatial definitions for areas such as left, right, top, bottom, etc. Use semantic names related to content and let the theme take care of their positioning interely. Also note that there in an ongoing debate in IA trying to build up a standard naming convention for page regions in a way that is semantically (and logically) correct. Just for the sake of it, you can check http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name.html http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name_pt2.html with follow-ups, including Eric Meyer's. There are more substantial contributes in the AIfIA web site, but I can't seem to find them now. I'll post a link or an abstract if I manage to. -- vector at exea dot it ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 19:15 : nedjo Good points, useful references. The default regions I'm thinking of are: 'banner' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), 'footer' => t('footer') Perhaps "body" would be better as "content"? It would be easy enough to add in more regions, e.g., within the content (after title, after help, etc.) One issue is that many of these regions will already have rendered content. Should the blocks come before or after that other content? I've assumed after for banner and footer, while giving both options in body. In any case, refinements or suggestions would be great. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 19:56 : resmini Well, 'banner' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), 'footer' => t('footer') The classic (as far as classic goes for something Web related) scheme comprises 5 spatial regions, much like stefan's http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png with a left area mirroring the one called 'blocks'. Call them top, left, center, right, bottom. Variants usually exclude one or more of these, layout-wise. If we talk content (semantic) instead, things get a bit more complicated, as these spatial regions normally include more than one content-area. The top, for example, could include ad banners and the site's header, or the main menu. But these merge seamlessly with CSS definitions, which are definitely something that should get properly standardized (most of the errors / inconsistencies I'm encountering with Drupal today are related to this), but this is out of scope in this thread. What I somewhat object to the definitions above is that it mixes the two approaches. 'banner' is not spatial, is content, as it is the distinction between body top and bottom. If 'banner' goes there, it is 'top', whatever that might be. I designed a couple of web sites which had headers/logos/banners at the bottom of the page, and I'm not exactly the wildest designer you'll probably meet. And if we include body_top and _bottom, we should also add 'navigation', or 'menu' and some other content-related semantic region (impressum, or company_data, or whatever). I suggest that either we go along 'top' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'center' => t('body'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'bottom' => t('footer') or we dedicate some time to detailing what could possibly fit there semantically, which is perfectly possible without limiting design freedom or whatever, since the vocabulary is not infinite, but not something you do out of the blue. Please note that I understand t('something') to be an example, since such a layout only defines regions on the page, not semantic regions. My main content could fit nicely in the bottom region. As for the names for the regions, they are not important, as much as they are coherent and enforced. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 22:16 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions-final.png (2.39 KB) Maybe something like this??? But, I have to say that I _really_ liked the solution to split the 'content'-region into the 'content' and 'beneath content'.. I love that! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 23:20 : resmini Stefan, yes. That's basically what you can build if you stick with spatial, and this layout can generate quite an amount of (sane) layout variations even if you interpret it strictly (suppose a default) as <div id="header"> </div> <div id="left-bar"> </div> <div id="content"> </div> <div id="right-bar"> </div> <div id="footer"> </div> What you can do with this is left basically to the theme designers and their use of CSS, CSS-P or tables (brrr), but this could be an easy and proper way to identify macro-regions in which more accurate positioning happens at a more specific level. I'm all in favour of subsequent identification of sub-areas (top and bottom in body), but I don't think it would be a good idea to mix the different approaches I mentioned in my previous post. A site with lots of things going on or which is not just blogging surely has the need to use its content area in a wiser manner than just putting there 'content', the number of modules doing precisely this is more than proof, but that falls more in a 'Drupal definitive guide to semantics', in which CSS selectors are used or suggested strategically for such a scope. >From this point of view and for the sake of this thread, any unique area / div (#name) could (should?) be a target for blocks, and this in my opinion (*) would be the perfect solution, but I do not know if and how this is even remotely possible in the current Drupal. (*) It's quite late, local time, and it was a looong working day. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 23:38 : resmini Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions-final-variation.png (1.9 KB) Just to be clear, I add a variation of stefan's scheme that shows how this is *not* by any means positional, but spatial, or better relational. Use your CSS imagination to take out regions, reduce them to empty containers, enlarge them, make them taller, shorter, whatever. 5 regions, do what you like. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 23:44 : resmini Sorry, I forgot. And this is also why I'm not too keen on calling anything 'content'. If I enlarge my right region enough, why not put my content there? Shouldn't this be a theme-level concern? It's nothing serious, but if my center area is called 'center' (or something similar and more sexy), I won't confuse anybody. This is left, center, right: do with them what you prefer. Content in the bottom? Show me. If I call something 'content', I'm more than suggesting that content goes there, and only there. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 09:17 : stefan nagtegaal Resmini, maybe it is only me but I think that you are making a mistake in your way of thinking.. I get the feeling that you're mixing the 'regions' and 'divs'.. the 'regioins' should have meaningfull sentences, but the divs shouldn'thave.. As an example: $region_name => $content_body here we go: 'header' => $logo 'left sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'left') 'right sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'right') 'content' => $content 'footer' => $footer. So, $region_name does not have to be equal to the id or class of the divs.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 10:27 : resmini Stefan, >So, $region_name does not have to be equal to the id or class of the divs.. Yes, absolutely. I probably didn't make myself very clear: what I'm trying to point out is that in 'header' => $logo 'left sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'left') 'right sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'right') 'content' => $content 'footer' => $footer. there is no reason at all to call 'content' the region that holds $content. nedjo asked in #24 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), if /Perhaps "body" would be better as "content"?/ and all my reasoning is simply that no, that is not content, or it shouldn't be (or better: it may happen that main content is elsewhere). As a matter of fact, even the connotation 'sidebar' doesn't fit very well logically. To make it short: Today's method works, but has limits. Mambo, which paragkenia quotes at the beginning, handles more 'user regions' but in pure Mambo style conventions are so loose that they are hardly useful. If we define regions, as in nedjo's example, in my opinion these regions shouldn't imply informational layouting, only relational positioning (that is, where they stay in the browser viewport). I know it may look like overdesigning, but Drupal constantly enforces conventions and coding guidelines everywhere: this is one of the best aspects of the project and I think it should carry to the layout. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 10:32 : stefan nagtegaal While I think that 'body_*' is not as self explaining as 'content_*' I vote for using 'content_*'.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2005 - 18:48 : chx Let's get back to the code. If my understanding is correct the big discussion is about how to name potiental rectangular areas _after_ this is commited. So, first get this committed. What's need to make that happen? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2005 - 19:56 : chx I spoke with Moshe, Steven, JonBob and the result is: keys shall be numbers, and themes shall define the values. We will make region zero and one required. There will be a define('REGION_CONTENT', 0) and a define('REGION_SIDEBAR', 1); so you can have readable code still. Either wait for me to code it or feel to do it yourself, just drop me a mail via the contact form if you are doing it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 27, 2005 - 17:14 : nedjo Károly, it's great if you're willing to take on finishing this. I tried to summarize remaining work in update 20, above [4]. The numerical keys look fine to me. In terms of an initial default set of regions, one quirk is this: for now, so far as I can see (and assuming the approach I sketched in), available regions can be defined only in (a) theme engines and (b) individual themes that don't use an engine. So, for instance, an individual xtemplate based theme can't define its own custom regions; they need to be defined in the theme engine. (Unless and until the whole theme system should switch to the sort of configuration file adrian suggested above [5].) Which is to say that, under this approach, we'll be defining a set of regions for each engine, and then all themes using that engine should try to implement those regions. (Otherwise, if a site admin selects a region defined in the engine but not implemented in the default theme, the content won't appear.) Please let me know if there's anything in what I've done that isn't clear, or if you want to pass some or all of this back. Thanks! [4] http://www.drupal.org/node/16216#comment-27398 [5] http://www.drupal.org/node/16216#comment-27052 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 21:36 : chx I had a "short" discussion with the UI team leader ie. Ber Kessels. The outcoming is that we will change hook_block so that it uses callbacks a bit like menu system. Here's an example: <?php function module_block() { $items = array(); $items['module_header'] = array('callback' => 'mymodule_page', 'weight' => -50, 'region' => 'content' , 'cache' => TRUE, 'pages' => "node/*\n<front>"); return $items; } ?> Please note that we are allowing caching the themed output of each block independently. The theme system will execute hook_block as it does now and it'll execute the callbacks defined in module_block as well. Of course if the callback is cacheable and in the cache, it'll print it from cache. If it's themeable and not in the cache, it'll cache it before printing. Pages contains a string (could be PHP code!) which can be overriden in the block configuration screen. Callbacks defined in hook_menu will have lot less functionality after this, they will be used for non-themed pages mainly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 21:45 : chx More explanation is requested for the example. module_header is the unqiue name of the block. pages define on which pages the block is visible. ('pages' in the block configuration screen.) Maybe I'll implement 'visibility' from the same screen as well. callback, weight are well known Drupal terms. cache is a boolean which defines whether given output is cacheable or not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 21:47 : chx Ber, Dries, do not kill me! Ber chaired the usability meeting in Antwerp, that's all.

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[drupal-devel] [feature] Enable multiple block regions (not just "left" and "right" sidebars)
by chx 09 May '05

09 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/16216 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: block.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: paragkenia Updated by: chx Status: patch Ber, Dries, do not kill me! Ber chaired the usability meeting in Antwerp, that's all. chx Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 26, 2005 - 12:27 : paragkenia I read the comparision discussion between *Drupal* and *Mambo*. In several messages it was outlined that Drupal can place blocks only in right and left and not flexible to put them on anywhere where one want. It will be great if this can be changed in upcoming versions. I am no pro at PHP, so don't know how much time this task will take, but I think it is very important. parag ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2005 - 03:44 : nedjo This issue was apparently partially addressed in issue http://drupal.org/node/19694 [1]. [1] http://drupal.org/node/19694 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 02:24 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions.patch (8.17 KB) This much-requested functionality - to have the ability to place blocks in more than the two predefined regions - was partially addressed in issue http://drupal.org/node/19694. [2]. But "blocks" are still limited to the "left" and "right" sidebars (hard-coded in block.module). This patch is a first step designed to enable multiple (eventually, admin-definable) regions for blocks. I've moved the existing "left" and "right" block regions to a 'region' table (with ids of 0 and 1, as currently used in themes). Then all references to the regions are drawn dynamically from the table. This way, if further records are added, they will appear in the list of available regions for block placement. Doing this actually reduces some duplicated code, since it's no longer necessary to repeat code blocks for each of "left" and "right". As it stands, the patch doesn't add any new functionality--but I don't think it breaks anything either. New functionality would need (a) new regions defined, and (b) changes to themes. A simple first step might be, e.g., to add a "footer" region and then add a call in the footer generation to append any blocks assigned to the footer region there. I'm setting this to patch, but I'm aware that it needs some discussion and refining before it'll be ready to apply. [2] http://drupal.org/node/19694. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 03:05 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block_regions.png (5.65 KB) Here's a screenshot showing the block admin page, with drop-downs for region placement (the options are dynamically generated based on defined regions). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 04:57 : adrian The biggest problem with this is that you can have multiple themes, and each of these themes can have different regions available. Also, the method of defining which regions are available needs to be standardised. Some of the work that me and Vlado are working on for the install system would go towards solving that problem (ie: meta information for modules, themes and styles). This has been discussed to death, but the general consensus has been that we _want_ to do this, but we need to solve a few other problems properly first, the most pertinent being the interface issue. Chris (factoryjoe) recently did a whole mess of workflows for something related to this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 06:09 : syscrusher The first paragraph of adrian [3]'s post is a point that occurred to me also, as I read this thread. One suggestion would be to separate the definition and configuration of blocks, on one hand, from the placement of those blocks, on the other hand. In other words, Drupal core provides a mechanism defining what blocks exist, which of these are on by default or off by default and user-selectable vs. which are forced on for all users, and the configuration (if applicable) of specialized blocks defined by particular modules. Each theme provides a standard hook function that returns an array of region names and help/description text, e.g., array('left'=>t('This vertical region is left of the main content area'), 'right'=>t('This vertical region is right of the main content area'), 'footer'=>t('The footer is below the left, right, and main content areas of the page')). The theme part of Drupal core (i.e., theme.module itself, not the individual themes) provides a standard UI that is displayed within config of *each theme* (but is one physical code base within theme.module) that allows the administrator to map blocks defined by Drupal core into regions defined by the theme, and storing that mapping as an theme-to-block_ID-to-region_ID (with weight) table in the database. From there, the actual page rendering is similar to what's being done now, but there is more of it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the key to solving this problem is breaking it along its degrees of orthogonality, and there are three -- two in Drupal core and one in the individual theme. Scott [3] http://drupal.org//user/1517 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 09:14 : Dries Scott, is right. The theme should export its available regions. Then the administrator's task is to assign blocks to regions (not to setup regions). A theme could have configurable regions, but that internal to the theme. To me, the real challenge is the UI and the interaction design. Configuring blocks could easily become a real pain (while most themes continue to use 'left' and 'right'.) Of course, we can implement all the functionality, default everything to 'left' and 'right', and worry about the UI later. This should be fairly straightforward to implement and nedjo's patch looks like a first step in the right direction. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 23:09 : nedjo I agree with the suggested approach of themes registering their regions. I'd see this happening when a particular theme is activiated (or upgraded). Regions would be an array of names (e.g., 'left', 'right', 'footer'). New records would be created in the region table only for region names not previously registered. Some areas I'm not clear on, or that need further work: Table naming Should a new table be 'region' or 'regions' (I've used 'region')? I don't see a convention among existing table names, some of which are singular and others plural. Default values I've kept the existing '0' and '1' ids for regions (left and right, respectively), for backward compatibility. But this means we can't use autoincrement for the region id (rid), since autoincrements seem to begin with 1. Likely we should change to autogenerated ids. Initial records Using the INSERT INTO statements as I've done for the initial region entries is probably counterproductive, since sooner or later they'll have to be dynamically generated. I was hoping this could be a preliminary patch, with the main work coming later, but likely we need to solve region registration by themes before this patch is applied. I don't have a good idea of how region registration by themes would be implemented (a hook on theme activation?), and invite suggestions or implementations. Theme system changes Besides region registration, the other change I'm seeing that would be needed in the theme system is loading blocks by region name, rather than region id. This is because the ids currently used ('0' and '1') in theory might be diffferent on a particular install. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 23:18 : syscrusher Instead of having themes "register" their regions, why not just add a theme API hook called them_regions() that returns an associative array of $region_name=>t($region_helptext)? This would be in keeping with other similar API functions, such as those that return what permissions apply to a module or what node types are defined by a module. Most themes are going to define only a small number of regions (two being the typical case now, but I could see five or six in a complex theme), so returning a constant array will be faster than querying SQL to obtain an array of rows. There could be (optionally, at the discretion of whoever builds this thing) another API hook like theme_region_properties($region_name) that returns an associative array with detailed info for a given region, such as extended help text with recommended usage instructions for the region. Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 17, 2005 - 23:19 : syscrusher s/them_regions/theme_regions/g ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 00:47 : adrian Because. The most common 'theme' is a phptemplate theme. And there needs to be a generic method for specifying the regions available, in a non hook_function format.. Themes get their names from the directory in which they are contained.. when copying the theme to another directory, there must be _no_ modifications necessary to allow normal usage. This is one of the tenets of the new template system I designed. You would need a standard way to define meta-information for themes, that does not need to be modified when copied to a new directory. We are working on this in the install system work, as you need a way external of Drupal to define the module dependencies and some other things. My approach would be to add a theme.dsc text file to the directory, which would allow you to specify meta-information. For instance : ---- regions: left, right, footer, center, mountie author: Johnny McAngstyPants ---- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 04:00 : syscrusher Adrian wrote: " Themes get their names from the directory in which they are contained.. when copying the theme to another directory, there must be _no_ modifications necessary to allow normal usage. This is one of the tenets of the new template system I designed. " A very good point. But region names don't have to be unique across different themes, so my hook function wouldn't have to be modified. The suggestion I made for the mapping metadata was three factors: theme ID or name, region ID or name, and block ID (plus one non-key weight value to order the blocks within a region, but this is not relevant here). I'm not familiar enough with PHP template to be able to respond to your comments on that one, so if you say it's not feasible to work with my schema, then I'll take your word for it. :-) Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 04:03 : syscrusher Oh, wait.....I see now what you mean! It's not the output of the function that is the problem, but the *name* of the function. Never mind. I concede your point. Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 09:44 : Jaza I'm probably jumping ahead a bit here... but something that this patch will have to eventually account for, is how to allow regions to be defined as inline. Allowing a theme to define a region's position as being anywhere on the edge of the page (i.e. top, left, right, bottom, corners, etc) is relatively easy. But what about having a region that's in the middle of a node's body, or somewhere else that's not the edge of the page? What I'm thinking of, is eventually allowing the custom region system to integrate with the CCK. Like I said, I admit that I'm jumping ahead into the future - the CCK still has a long way to go before it's ready. But ultimately, it would be cool if a theme could define a region as being after, say, the "rating" field in nodes of type "movie review". This would make the region (and the blocks in it) truly inline and in context with the actual content of the node. This would be a huge step forward compared to the current block system, which doesn't allow you to mix the presentation of blocks and nodes at all. In Drupal ATM, blocks and "the rest of the page" are totally separate, and really you have no choice but to display them as such. The result of this is that information in blocks that really should be displayed as part of a node, gets literally "pushed to the side", and always seems secondary to the actual content. Often the block has content that is just as important as the content of the node itself. Another option (of less merit, IMO - because of the extra maintenance work, and lack of enforced consistency) would be to have a region filter. You could then choose where to place an inline region on a per-node basis, by entering text such as [region:2] (example based on image_filter syntax) into the node body. Anyway, just thought I'd throw that idea into the open. I don't expect it will be implemented any time soon, but it's something to think about. Jeremy ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 10:54 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png (1.29 KB) Imo the 'regions' are more than you guys name here.. FOr example I attached 2 screens which only shows you the regions.. What I think is that it should always be possible to have free names for the regions. No matter if i call - the region where my content appears in - 'content' or 'site items'.. See attached screens.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 10:56 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-2.png (1.39 KB) And the second... See these links: - http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png - http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-2.png ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 17:22 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions2.patch (13.39 KB) Here's a revised patch implementing some of the ideas so far. I've used the theme engine - rather than individual themes - to generate the list of available regions. I know this isn't ideal, but e.g. for xtemplate it's at present the only option--no logic is possible in the individual theme. region is changed to a varchar field from the current tinyint. I've roughed in several regions--really just for demo purposes. More thought and work would be needed to refine them (e.g., styling, etc.). But this maybe moves the conversation forward. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 23:26 : Dries This patch enables different regions to be used. That is a good thing. The next question is: should we take into account that different themes could assign blocks to different regions? Lots of problems would be solved if (i) there could only be one active theme on a website or (ii) if all themes would have a common set of regions. (This "let users select their own theme"-thing is a left-over from the early days, except for WAP stuff maybe.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 23:37 : killes(a)www.drop.org Giving up multiple theme support would be a great thing. People could still select from multiple style sheets. WAP shoud not be a user preference setting, but automatically detected and redirected to a special site with a WAP theme. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 18, 2005 - 23:48 : adrian You would then lose the ability to make a special front page theme for use with the sections module, for instance. Also, currently styles exist in the same namespace as themes, and we would have to make more a distinction of styles vs templates (or themes), but I do think this could help simplify things. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 18:54 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block-dynamic-regions3.patch (15.69 KB) The main issue raised, if I'm understanding well: if a theme or theme engine is present that offers regions other than those available in the default theme, any blocks assigned to those regions will be invisible to most users. Here's a revised patch addressing the concern. I've added a test for each region to see whether it's also available in the current default theme. (Actually, I'm realizing as I write this, I've used the theme engine--so it would need to be updated to test first if an engine is being used.) In any case, any regions not available by default are starred, and a message text appears (only if necessary). If there's support for the approach, I'd be happy to finish the patch. Remaining work: * extend to work with non-engine themes * finalize base set of regions to implement * implement common region set in all core themes (for now I've only done xtemplate) * work on CSS display (how blocks in each region should look) This last point I'm not too confident on and would look for help/suggestions. Screenshot to come. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 18:56 : nedjo Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/block_regions_message.png (12.34 KB) Screenshot showing starring of non-default regions plus message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 19:19 : killes(a)www.drop.org I like that approach. +1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 19:23 : resmini My two cents. If this has to be done (and it should), better get rid of spatial definitions for areas such as left, right, top, bottom, etc. Use semantic names related to content and let the theme take care of their positioning interely. Also note that there in an ongoing debate in IA trying to build up a standard naming convention for page regions in a way that is semantically (and logically) correct. Just for the sake of it, you can check http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name.html http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name_pt2.html with follow-ups, including Eric Meyer's. There are more substantial contributes in the AIfIA web site, but I can't seem to find them now. I'll post a link or an abstract if I manage to. -- vector at exea dot it ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 20:15 : nedjo Good points, useful references. The default regions I'm thinking of are: 'banner' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), 'footer' => t('footer') Perhaps "body" would be better as "content"? It would be easy enough to add in more regions, e.g., within the content (after title, after help, etc.) One issue is that many of these regions will already have rendered content. Should the blocks come before or after that other content? I've assumed after for banner and footer, while giving both options in body. In any case, refinements or suggestions would be great. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 20:56 : resmini Well, 'banner' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), 'footer' => t('footer') The classic (as far as classic goes for something Web related) scheme comprises 5 spatial regions, much like stefan's http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions---possibility-1.png with a left area mirroring the one called 'blocks'. Call them top, left, center, right, bottom. Variants usually exclude one or more of these, layout-wise. If we talk content (semantic) instead, things get a bit more complicated, as these spatial regions normally include more than one content-area. The top, for example, could include ad banners and the site's header, or the main menu. But these merge seamlessly with CSS definitions, which are definitely something that should get properly standardized (most of the errors / inconsistencies I'm encountering with Drupal today are related to this), but this is out of scope in this thread. What I somewhat object to the definitions above is that it mixes the two approaches. 'banner' is not spatial, is content, as it is the distinction between body top and bottom. If 'banner' goes there, it is 'top', whatever that might be. I designed a couple of web sites which had headers/logos/banners at the bottom of the page, and I'm not exactly the wildest designer you'll probably meet. And if we include body_top and _bottom, we should also add 'navigation', or 'menu' and some other content-related semantic region (impressum, or company_data, or whatever). I suggest that either we go along 'top' => t('banner'), 'left' => t('left sidebar'), 'center' => t('body'), 'right' => t('right sidebar'), 'bottom' => t('footer') or we dedicate some time to detailing what could possibly fit there semantically, which is perfectly possible without limiting design freedom or whatever, since the vocabulary is not infinite, but not something you do out of the blue. Please note that I understand t('something') to be an example, since such a layout only defines regions on the page, not semantic regions. My main content could fit nicely in the bottom region. As for the names for the regions, they are not important, as much as they are coherent and enforced. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2005 - 23:16 : stefan nagtegaal Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions-final.png (2.39 KB) Maybe something like this??? But, I have to say that I _really_ liked the solution to split the 'content'-region into the 'content' and 'beneath content'.. I love that! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 00:20 : resmini Stefan, yes. That's basically what you can build if you stick with spatial, and this layout can generate quite an amount of (sane) layout variations even if you interpret it strictly (suppose a default) as <div id="header"> </div> <div id="left-bar"> </div> <div id="content"> </div> <div id="right-bar"> </div> <div id="footer"> </div> What you can do with this is left basically to the theme designers and their use of CSS, CSS-P or tables (brrr), but this could be an easy and proper way to identify macro-regions in which more accurate positioning happens at a more specific level. I'm all in favour of subsequent identification of sub-areas (top and bottom in body), but I don't think it would be a good idea to mix the different approaches I mentioned in my previous post. A site with lots of things going on or which is not just blogging surely has the need to use its content area in a wiser manner than just putting there 'content', the number of modules doing precisely this is more than proof, but that falls more in a 'Drupal definitive guide to semantics', in which CSS selectors are used or suggested strategically for such a scope. >From this point of view and for the sake of this thread, any unique area / div (#name) could (should?) be a target for blocks, and this in my opinion (*) would be the perfect solution, but I do not know if and how this is even remotely possible in the current Drupal. (*) It's quite late, local time, and it was a looong working day. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 00:38 : resmini Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/regions-final-variation.png (1.9 KB) Just to be clear, I add a variation of stefan's scheme that shows how this is *not* by any means positional, but spatial, or better relational. Use your CSS imagination to take out regions, reduce them to empty containers, enlarge them, make them taller, shorter, whatever. 5 regions, do what you like. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 00:44 : resmini Sorry, I forgot. And this is also why I'm not too keen on calling anything 'content'. If I enlarge my right region enough, why not put my content there? Shouldn't this be a theme-level concern? It's nothing serious, but if my center area is called 'center' (or something similar and more sexy), I won't confuse anybody. This is left, center, right: do with them what you prefer. Content in the bottom? Show me. If I call something 'content', I'm more than suggesting that content goes there, and only there. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 10:17 : stefan nagtegaal Resmini, maybe it is only me but I think that you are making a mistake in your way of thinking.. I get the feeling that you're mixing the 'regions' and 'divs'.. the 'regioins' should have meaningfull sentences, but the divs shouldn'thave.. As an example: $region_name => $content_body here we go: 'header' => $logo 'left sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'left') 'right sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'right') 'content' => $content 'footer' => $footer. So, $region_name does not have to be equal to the id or class of the divs.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 11:27 : resmini Stefan, >So, $region_name does not have to be equal to the id or class of the divs.. Yes, absolutely. I probably didn't make myself very clear: what I'm trying to point out is that in 'header' => $logo 'left sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'left') 'right sidebar' => theme('blocks', 'right') 'content' => $content 'footer' => $footer. there is no reason at all to call 'content' the region that holds $content. nedjo asked in #24 'body_top' => t('body top'), 'body_bottom' => t('body bottom'), if /Perhaps "body" would be better as "content"?/ and all my reasoning is simply that no, that is not content, or it shouldn't be (or better: it may happen that main content is elsewhere). As a matter of fact, even the connotation 'sidebar' doesn't fit very well logically. To make it short: Today's method works, but has limits. Mambo, which paragkenia quotes at the beginning, handles more 'user regions' but in pure Mambo style conventions are so loose that they are hardly useful. If we define regions, as in nedjo's example, in my opinion these regions shouldn't imply informational layouting, only relational positioning (that is, where they stay in the browser viewport). I know it may look like overdesigning, but Drupal constantly enforces conventions and coding guidelines everywhere: this is one of the best aspects of the project and I think it should carry to the layout. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2005 - 11:32 : stefan nagtegaal While I think that 'body_*' is not as self explaining as 'content_*' I vote for using 'content_*'.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2005 - 19:48 : chx Let's get back to the code. If my understanding is correct the big discussion is about how to name potiental rectangular areas _after_ this is commited. So, first get this committed. What's need to make that happen? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2005 - 20:56 : chx I spoke with Moshe, Steven, JonBob and the result is: keys shall be numbers, and themes shall define the values. We will make region zero and one required. There will be a define('REGION_CONTENT', 0) and a define('REGION_SIDEBAR', 1); so you can have readable code still. Either wait for me to code it or feel to do it yourself, just drop me a mail via the contact form if you are doing it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 27, 2005 - 18:14 : nedjo Károly, it's great if you're willing to take on finishing this. I tried to summarize remaining work in update 20, above [4]. The numerical keys look fine to me. In terms of an initial default set of regions, one quirk is this: for now, so far as I can see (and assuming the approach I sketched in), available regions can be defined only in (a) theme engines and (b) individual themes that don't use an engine. So, for instance, an individual xtemplate based theme can't define its own custom regions; they need to be defined in the theme engine. (Unless and until the whole theme system should switch to the sort of configuration file adrian suggested above [5].) Which is to say that, under this approach, we'll be defining a set of regions for each engine, and then all themes using that engine should try to implement those regions. (Otherwise, if a site admin selects a region defined in the engine but not implemented in the default theme, the content won't appear.) Please let me know if there's anything in what I've done that isn't clear, or if you want to pass some or all of this back. Thanks! [4] http://www.drupal.org/node/16216#comment-27398 [5] http://www.drupal.org/node/16216#comment-27052 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:36 : chx I had a "short" discussion with the UI team leader ie. Ber Kessels. The outcoming is that we will change hook_block so that it uses callbacks a bit like menu system. Here's an example: <?php function module_block() { $items = array(); $items['module_header'] = array('callback' => 'mymodule_page', 'weight' => -50, 'region' => 'content' , 'cache' => TRUE, 'pages' => "node/*\n<front>"); return $items; } ?> Please note that we are allowing caching the themed output of each block independently. The theme system will execute hook_block as it does now and it'll execute the callbacks defined in module_block as well. Of course if the callback is cacheable and in the cache, it'll print it from cache. If it's themeable and not in the cache, it'll cache it before printing. Pages contains a string (could be PHP code!) which can be overriden in the block configuration screen. Callbacks defined in hook_menu will have lot less functionality after this, they will be used for non-themed pages mainly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 9, 2005 - 22:45 : chx More explanation is requested for the example. module_header is the unqiue name of the block. pages define on which pages the block is visible. ('pages' in the block configuration screen.) Maybe I'll implement 'visibility' from the same screen as well. callback, weight are well known Drupal terms. cache is a boolean which defines whether given output is cacheable or not.

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