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[drupal-devel] [feature] Administration Control Panel suggestion
by der 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/31326 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/31326 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: system.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: der Updated by: der Status: patch (code needs review) Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_2.patch (5.48 KB) Patch fixing the issue that syllance pointed out and it also fixes the obvious issue with the drupal_goto function arguments. duh! der Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:50:52 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system_9.patch (4.27 KB) New feature suggestion: I would like to suggest a couple of enhancments to administration pages. First, add a new general settings option to allow the user to specify the admin home page. Currently the watchdog log view is the default home page. Second, add a new control panel page that can be used as the default admin start page. I've attached a suggested patch to the CVS head version of the system.module that implements these two enhancements. The patch does the following. Adds a new "default admin page" text field to the general settings group (just after the "default front page"). It also changes the admin menu entry to call a new function that examines the default "admin page" variable and redirects to the appropriate path. For the control panel, the patch adds a new function (system_admin_controlpanel). This function basically looks for the admin entry in the menu structure and then iterates through the child menu items and builds a control panel page using the path and title information returned from the menu structure. For the control panel icons it looks for an icon file in the misc directory that matches the name of the menu item (e.g. user.png, access.png etc) If it doesn't find an icon it uses a default. I've also included some 48/48 icons that I borrowed from my usr/share/icon/gnome directory of my local Linux box. I believe these are gnome GPL'ed icons but any 48/48 icons could be used. This patch allows users who prefer the current functionality to keep it as their default. It provides the option for others to make any admin page they want to be their admin "home page" including using a graphical control panel. Module developers that add new admin menu options can add their own custom icons for the control panel but they are not "required" to do so as a default will be used if they don't provide one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:52:15 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal_controlpanel_icons.zip (39.09 KB) 48x48 icons attached ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:30:16 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system_2_0.patch (4.5 KB) updated patch. slightly changed the formatting of the control panel page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:37:24 +0000 : moggy I quite like this. It certainly goes some way to making Drupal easier on the eyes for first time users. I noticed there's a lot of hard coded style. Would this not be better in a stylesheet and the code just containing classes and ids? Also would a dropdown box of possible admin pages be better than trying to remember how to spell controlpanel (something I'm having trouble with tonight ;-) ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:02:08 +0000 : syllance Nice job :) the default admin page is a nice feature, and the controlpanel is a very good idea. This goes in the good direction to make Drupal more user friendly. i agree with the dropdown menu and stylesheet additions, but i already really appreciate the current version. hope this will go into core soon, as it really makes the first admin pages contact better :) i don't mind scrolling through the nav menu and i rarely goes into admin without checking the logs, but that definitely will help me converting my wife's site to drupal :p thanks ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:09:43 +0000 : der I'll move the styles off to a style sheet but I'm uncertain about whether or not make make the default admin page a dropdown. It's an easy change and it eliminates any typos by the user but it also restricts the user to a current visible admin menu item. If by chance someone wanted to write their own admin start page (ie their own control panel) they would have to hack the core system.module to do it. Anyone else want to weigh in with their preference? Also, anyone up for creating drupalized versions of the control panel icons? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:16:15 +0000 : chx Maybe just because I created it, I like my control panel module better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:25:30 +0000 : der If I would have known there was a module I wouldn't have written this patch although I do think this would be good for core Drupal as the default. Is your modules a recent creation? I don't see it on drupal.org nor could I find in the contribs section of CVS (either the modules or sandbox sections). I'm I missing something? Is it called something different? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:20:15 +0000 : syllance chx control panel is located in his sandbox (cp.module), and thanks to him for letting us know there's one :) it's working fine (tested on HEAD) and provide interesting concept for navigating through the admin, instead of just add a frontend. the settings part is the better one, listing all elements in the page makes quickly forget the standard menu. der's one looks nice and provide a more immediate access to admin pages, but the standard menu is still mandatory to access some elements (dba or store settings for example, still needs to be accessed via left menu). to be honest, i like them both :) being able to change the default admin page is very nice, and icons make admin looks a lot better, raising the Woman Acceptance Factor by a huge amount (my wife loves it :). but i also really like the more in depth admin navigation offered by chx module. mixing both on my head setup gives a nice result, so may be it would be a good idea to join forces and mix the 2 panels. chx, is your module somewhat official and scheduled to hit the core ? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:24:11 +0000 : Amazon Hi, I asked Karoly to create the control panel module. It important that the control panel be tied into the navigation menu block so that it does not create inconsistent navigation. The goal is to start a user experience grouping exercise to help the community categorize administration tasks. The first thing that has to happen is that administration must be considered a seperate situation from creating personal content in Drupal. To support this seperation of personal tasks and administration tasks we broke out administration to have a separate theme in the CivicSpace theme. Through research interviews into Drupal administration we need to discover what the goals and tasks of administrators are. Some early feedback is that site developers need modules to be evaluated on Drupal.org. They have also indicated they need better and consistent administration help ,with incontext list, which we have been adding. We have also heard administrators want a quick overview. Any change to provide a control panel like overview must have a dashboard like overview. You should assume that we will identify a list of 5-7 top goals for administrators. Once those those 5-7 top goals are identified we need to ensure administrators can acommplish tasks to achieve those goals. Some of those tasks will completed by clicking through to icons or admin interface links. Sub-goals will be accomplished by providing effective navigation. We need to consider 4 types of navigation to be added to the control panel: Global navigation, local navigation, contextual navigation, and situational navigation. Some of this navigation can be accomplished through a theme or blocks. Some will need to be in the page and some need to be added in otherways, such as interaction techniques. Keep all this in mind when creating a control panel solution. It also must respond to the fact that every site will have different permissions set and different modules. This is a complex problem and it's going to research and experimentation to get it right. But this is a big step in the right direction. Cheers, Kieran ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:47:55 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system.module_11.patch (5.61 KB) This has sparked a lot of good discussion. I've taken a look at cp.module and I think it really is complimentary with my proposed patch. I've taken my patch one step further and provided the settings icons in a collapsable group below the main control panel. This would allow access to all admin functions without referring to the traditional menu. Syllance, do you think this addresses the gap you saw in my solution? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 20:33:10 +0000 : der Kieran, I'm glad to see some serious thought going into the user experience for site administrators. I think separating the user and admin sections of the site is critical. It will not only allow extensive usability work to be done for site admins it will also make it much easier for theme creators as they will be able to focus on the end user experience. I like the admin theme for civicspace. My only dislike about the approach is that it's template driven which causes a sites template to be larger and more complex due to handling all the logic for user and admin themes. I think a better approach may be to use a module such as the sections module. This allows you to have smaller templates focused on user or admin themes. I agree with your point about making sure the control panel ties into them menu system. My approach uses the existing menu structure so modules are added dynamically and all permissions are enforced. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:21:05 +0000 : chx <?php function _system_adminpage () { drupal_goto($path = variable_get('site_adminpage', 'admin/controlpanel'), $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL); } ?> no way. Use menu !$may_cache and set the path based on the variable. Adding in-line style elements is also a no-go. The code style is not kept. Never a space between full stop and apostrophe, always otherwise. It's not $menuvisible but $menu_visible I must be blind (it's 0:17am) but // Build the settings section of the control panel does not seem to differ from the previous section. A function may be appropriate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:39:40 +0000 : der Thanks for the code feedback. I'm assuming the extracted style info would get patched to drupal.css? Your right about the duplicate code. A function would make more sense, I'll make the change. I'm not sure about the comment to use "$may_cache" I've never used it before. What's it's purpose? How should I use it in this situation. I'll dig around and see if I can figure it out but I thought you might be able to give me a little insight. Thanks! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 10:41:00 +0000 : syllance der, i've checked the new version of your control panel, and it does simplify access to the settings menu (although with a complex setup, the site config collapsable menu goes a lot more down than the menu, but this a page and not a small menu so its still better) however, there other case settings like, such as the ecommerce modules, which provides a more complex menu tree (ex : store->settings->payment->adjustments, each with their own admin pages). these are not taken into account by your panel, leaving the menu mandatory. chx control panel handles this nicely with page navigation. going through the store menu with chx panel is a real pleasure while its a real pain with the menu. So i think the best would be to mix the two panels, chx one handling page navigation, and yours providing a frontend for basic admin pages, and collapsable site config items. instead of linking to the standard admin pages, icons might link to chx nav pages where there are sub entries. i'm running both today, and this already makes the admin really better, but i'm often switching from der panel to chx one (for store), so mixing both would be, for me, a very nice solution :p thanks for the good work :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:54:55 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel.patch (5.61 KB) Here's a new patch with the code reworked per chx's comments with the exception of his objection to my use of drupal_goto function. chx, I'm probably missing something really obvious but I'm not understanding your suggestion. Are you suggesting I use some menu function to do the redirect? If so, I could not find one that suits my needs. Or are you suggesting to use the drupal_goto function in a different manner than I am using it. Like I said, I'm probably missing something really obvious here but for the life of me I don't know what it is. Any further advice would be greatly appreciated. The offending code below: <?php function _system_adminpage () { drupal_goto($path = variable_get('site_adminpage', 'admin/controlpanel'), $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL); } ?> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 13:42:57 +0000 : syllance i think there's a problem with your latest patch. it seems to display all icons as a vertical list. it may be a problem with my setup, but i'm using basic themes that comes with head. the administer page is thus very long, and this is not very useful. previous version was better, imho :) thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:10:03 +0000 : der which theme and which browser are you using? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:59:16 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_0.patch (5.32 KB) I've tested this with IE and FireFox with each of the Drupal shipped HEAD themes and I'm not seeing the issue you described. Are you sure the patch applied correctly to drupal.css? Here's a slightly revised patch. It make the control panel icon group collapsable but open by default. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:09:22 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_1.patch (5.64 KB) Sorry for the excessive number of patches. I just realized that my previous patch had an issue with icon image file names if there were admin and admin/settings menu items that were the same (eg admin/user and admin/settings/user). New patch attached to address. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:13:49 +0000 : syllance the vertical thing was probably due to a problem with my drupal.css. i've tested your new patch with a fresh update and the display is fine, but there's a bug. the site configuration panel displays store settings items (checkout,payment,shipping), and not the global settings one. this might be due to the menus item having the same name 'settings', although not located at the same level (administer/settings, and administer/store/settings). ready for another patch ? :) your panel adds a nice look and enable default administer page setup. but there's still a lot of menu access needed when other modules are setup (such as ecommerce), and i'm using it in addition to chx one to provide a complete admin solution :) chx one looks just like the theme you're using with no icons, but it really help accelerating admin navigation. i'm wondering if integrating both to core wouldn't be the ultimate solution. your panel more targeted at standard admin needs, and chx one helping users that deals with lots of modules & settings. thanks again ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:19:54 +0000 : Amazon Hi, can you guys post some screen shots as you go along for those of us who don't want to keep installing new patches. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:25:06 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Control Panel.png (101.02 KB) Sure, here's what the current version looks like with the civicspace admin theme.

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[drupal-devel] [feature] Separate mail backend
by vwX 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/28604 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/28604 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: base system Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: Dries Updated by: vwX Status: patch (code needs review) Did some testing on Killes changes. Queued ~1000 addresses for one email. When sending started receiving this message : " warning: mail(): Could not execute mail delivery program '/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i ' in /home/webuser/mars/www/drupal/modules/mail.module on line 189. " at around message 258. Looking further seems sendmail got hammered. This is a RH6.2 box 550MHz processor with 256MB memory and sendmail configured to use a smarthost qmail server. I can share the script to test if anybody wants to help. Will try a bit more after I do some tuning. Now about the changes. I think that the mail_queue_addresses table key structure needs to be changed. Remove Aid and just use address. Also, I've always used a primary key structure of parent table primary key + one or more additional keys for a child table. Originally I had something like this, but it is now one primary key and an index. I don't think this is correct and I've been doing database work for 15 odd years. Also, I agree with what m3avrck says. Orginally when I submitted the code I had most of the functionality in mail.inc and the module was primarily for administrative functions. I also functionality to view what was in the queue and force the sending of messages in the queue. That has since been removed and I think it should be re-added. vwX Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:35:37 +0000 : Dries It was suggested that we separate the mail backend from the front-end. We might want to include the mail backend in core as includes/mail.inc. Then, other modules like massmailer, subscriptions, notify, pm (private messages), project (project issues), contact, etc. could reuse this component. The mail.inc file would implement some kind of mail queue functionality, and modules just add a mail to the mail queue using a simple /mail API/. In future, the mail backend could deal with bounces and report back proper status codes. Moreover, mail.inc would be pluggable so it could be replaced by a more powerful one, or one that is build specifically for the underlying mail transport (SMTP server). Furthermore, this would solve issues with how many mails get send within a specified interval. Like, when more than one module sends out e-mails it is hard to enforce limitations/restrictions imposed by the hosting company. I'm posting this here so you can keep this in mind when working on simplenews, and to solicit for feedback. Chances are we'll setup an IRC meeting to discuss this further. Details to follow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 10 Aug 2005 16:15:16 +0000 : Amazon A good place to start would be to look at existing Mail API's Pear Mail: http://pear.php.net/package/Mail Pear Mail tutorial: http://www.zend.com/pear/tutorials/Mail.php#Heading2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 10 Aug 2005 20:21:57 +0000 : walkah um. +1 and then some. I think this is good... and some good references from Amazon. I'll throw in one other : http://phpmailer.sf.net/ - has great mime handling (i've run into issues with PEAR::Mail's mime handilng in the past, but that was around 2 years ago, and things may have gotten better since then). Oh - and you don't mention it - but support for multipart / mime messages would be lovely :) I'd be interested in / happy to sit in on any IRC discussion as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 10 Aug 2005 21:40:34 +0000 : robertDouglass phpmailer++ I've used it and like how easy it is to send both text and html mail. Did I say html mail? You bet! It's time that we had the option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 11 Aug 2005 05:47:01 +0000 : cyberchucktx I'm definitely interested. Hopefully by adding a post to this I'll get notified on new postings (?) If not I may miss the IRC .. I've been doing a lot of work with safe_mode PHPLIST (have posted to the drupal site somewhee, can dig out the reference if anyone is interested). Charlie in TX ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 17 Aug 2005 08:42:34 +0000 : Dries It was suggested that mail.inc also provides a HTML to text services. Lots of modules (newsletter, notify, project) try converting HTML to text. Having a reusable function makes sense, and will lead to better conversion routines. XSLT anyone? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 17 Aug 2005 12:31:27 +0000 : Grugnog2 +1 for phpmailer I found it very easy to use - and most importantly for me - it supports SMTP authentication. As many ISP's will not let you send mail without using SMTP-auth nowadays it may be worth this feature is incorporated into the mail.inc API. - Grug ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 17 Aug 2005 15:08:43 +0000 : Robert Castelo For about a year now I've been working on an email newsletter and announcement module [1]. There's a version in my sandbox commited about 2 months ago which works fairly well. Dan Robinson and Varr Willis at CivicActions, Moshe Weitzman plus a few others have been testing it, and I've had lots of positive feedback and feature and bug reports from them. A few months ago a realised that there's not much point in putting so much effort into creating all this functionality, only for it to be locked away in my module. Better to Better to create discreet component modules which provide a particular service, such as bounced email handling, but which can be used by any other module that also needs that service. For the last two months I've been working to split functionality into component services modules and make these services available to all modules. One of the biggest challenges was to make these component modules independent of each other. The only area where I haven't managed this is some of the database calls - but thanks to a chat with chx I realised that db_rewrite_sql could be used to handle this very nicely. This is what I have: * bounced_email.module - process bounced emails * html2text.module - convert HTML to plain text equivalent (e.g. list item becomes "* item") * identity_hash.module - manages full and partial loggin based on hash which can be used in email links * publication.module - defines and packages content of publication, which could be any kind of publication * schedule.module - defines and manages schedules, e.g. email sending schedule * subscribed.module - manages subscriptions to publications * templates.module - manage and define templates What's great is that the component modules are not limited to email, they could be used to quickly create RSS newsletters, PDF newsletters, text message newsletters, or even personalised/filtered website sections. I haven't made the new component modules available anywhere yet, but I'll be happy to upload them to contrib and let others get involved. What would be the best way to commit them - as a single directory? or each component module in it's own directory? [1] http://www.cortextcommunications.com/development/newsletter/features ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 02:05:18 +0000 : vwX Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/mailqueue.tar.gz (3.71 KB) This is a very basic mail queue system I would like to contribute. There are some changes to other modules that will have to be made such as changing user.module to use this instead of directly calling the php mail function and moving mime_header_encoding to mail.inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:25:11 +0000 : killes(a)www.drop.org Note: I am moving this to the main project. VwX: What I see looks very nice for a start. Some polishing is certainly needed, but I'd like to try this. If I only had the time... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 16 Sep 2005 22:10:19 +0000 : killes(a)www.drop.org Ok, I've been doing some clean-up on this one and made contact.module use it. The module and the .inc file work. I've put the files into my sandbox for now. I plan to work on them over the weekend (unless Dries tells me they are too late for 4.7). http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/killes/mail/ But I could use some input: - the sql file defines a column to store the module that generated the mail. Do we want this? If yes, we need to fix it. - Do we need a throttle for only sending x mails per cron run? - can somebody try the files with php5? - what else do we need? Please give input, links and what not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 20:34:04 +0000 : Dries Some of my comments might be false. If so, sorry. I only looked at it for 5 minutes: * I wonder why we need per-module settings. I can't think of concrete use cases. * For consistency, mailid needs to be mid. * I don't see an option to send mails immediately? * I don't see any "messages per hour" accounting? * I don't understand why mail.inc should be node system aware? * mailid = '%s' should be mailid = %d. * Incorrect use of t(): don't translate user input. * The coding style needs work; inconsistent variable names, inconsistent spacing, etc. * Some PHPDoc is rather cryptic: /Updates table mail queue address table sets sent flag to 1 for a queued msg./. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 04:28:11 +0000 : killes(a)www.drop.org I've fixed a number of things. needs testing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 02:28:25 +0000 : killes(a)www.drop.org Ok, changed and tested. Some more changes, taken some concepts from massmailer.module. Included hacked copies of simplenews and contact module for testing purposes. We need to discuss if this should be a module or a part od system.module. depending on the outcome we need to put the functions in mail.module and mail.inc into different files. Testers welcome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 06:31:04 +0000 : Peter Apockotos Dries, Are you talking about something like I request here http://drupal.org/node/28079 ? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:15:20 +0000 : m3avrck Well first off, just wanted to say I'm currently evaluating this and been sending regular feedback to killes for improvements. So far so good on PHP5 machines :-) But in terms of where should this code go, I think mail.module should be eliminated and those functions should be put in mail.inc which *should* be seperate from common.inc. This way, as Drupal grows and more and more modules depend upon mail functions, they will be in their unqiue spot which can easily be patched and extended instead of rummaging through the common.inc mess ;-) As a result, the mail.module settings should be moved to Admin > Settings with the mail setup there, since the basic Drupal "request new password" etc framework requires mail functionality and having these settings there makes the most sense, usability wise. I think with this setup the code could be organized in the cleanest and most straightforward method and would be an elegant refinement in mail handling for 4.7... no new features, just cleaned up and seperate for other modules to make use of, instead of duplicating code and time. This also has the benefit of bringing in more patches to the Drupal core and how it handles mail and making it rock solid. Just my 2 cents.

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[drupal-devel] [feature] Administration Control Panel suggestion
by der 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/31326 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/31326 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: system.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: der Updated by: der Status: patch (code needs review) Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/Control Panel.png (101.02 KB) Sure, here's what the current version looks like with the civicspace admin theme. der Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:50:52 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system_9.patch (4.27 KB) New feature suggestion: I would like to suggest a couple of enhancments to administration pages. First, add a new general settings option to allow the user to specify the admin home page. Currently the watchdog log view is the default home page. Second, add a new control panel page that can be used as the default admin start page. I've attached a suggested patch to the CVS head version of the system.module that implements these two enhancements. The patch does the following. Adds a new "default admin page" text field to the general settings group (just after the "default front page"). It also changes the admin menu entry to call a new function that examines the default "admin page" variable and redirects to the appropriate path. For the control panel, the patch adds a new function (system_admin_controlpanel). This function basically looks for the admin entry in the menu structure and then iterates through the child menu items and builds a control panel page using the path and title information returned from the menu structure. For the control panel icons it looks for an icon file in the misc directory that matches the name of the menu item (e.g. user.png, access.png etc) If it doesn't find an icon it uses a default. I've also included some 48/48 icons that I borrowed from my usr/share/icon/gnome directory of my local Linux box. I believe these are gnome GPL'ed icons but any 48/48 icons could be used. This patch allows users who prefer the current functionality to keep it as their default. It provides the option for others to make any admin page they want to be their admin "home page" including using a graphical control panel. Module developers that add new admin menu options can add their own custom icons for the control panel but they are not "required" to do so as a default will be used if they don't provide one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:52:15 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal_controlpanel_icons.zip (39.09 KB) 48x48 icons attached ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:30:16 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system_2_0.patch (4.5 KB) updated patch. slightly changed the formatting of the control panel page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:37:24 +0000 : moggy I quite like this. It certainly goes some way to making Drupal easier on the eyes for first time users. I noticed there's a lot of hard coded style. Would this not be better in a stylesheet and the code just containing classes and ids? Also would a dropdown box of possible admin pages be better than trying to remember how to spell controlpanel (something I'm having trouble with tonight ;-) ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:02:08 +0000 : syllance Nice job :) the default admin page is a nice feature, and the controlpanel is a very good idea. This goes in the good direction to make Drupal more user friendly. i agree with the dropdown menu and stylesheet additions, but i already really appreciate the current version. hope this will go into core soon, as it really makes the first admin pages contact better :) i don't mind scrolling through the nav menu and i rarely goes into admin without checking the logs, but that definitely will help me converting my wife's site to drupal :p thanks ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:09:43 +0000 : der I'll move the styles off to a style sheet but I'm uncertain about whether or not make make the default admin page a dropdown. It's an easy change and it eliminates any typos by the user but it also restricts the user to a current visible admin menu item. If by chance someone wanted to write their own admin start page (ie their own control panel) they would have to hack the core system.module to do it. Anyone else want to weigh in with their preference? Also, anyone up for creating drupalized versions of the control panel icons? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:16:15 +0000 : chx Maybe just because I created it, I like my control panel module better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:25:30 +0000 : der If I would have known there was a module I wouldn't have written this patch although I do think this would be good for core Drupal as the default. Is your modules a recent creation? I don't see it on drupal.org nor could I find in the contribs section of CVS (either the modules or sandbox sections). I'm I missing something? Is it called something different? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:20:15 +0000 : syllance chx control panel is located in his sandbox (cp.module), and thanks to him for letting us know there's one :) it's working fine (tested on HEAD) and provide interesting concept for navigating through the admin, instead of just add a frontend. the settings part is the better one, listing all elements in the page makes quickly forget the standard menu. der's one looks nice and provide a more immediate access to admin pages, but the standard menu is still mandatory to access some elements (dba or store settings for example, still needs to be accessed via left menu). to be honest, i like them both :) being able to change the default admin page is very nice, and icons make admin looks a lot better, raising the Woman Acceptance Factor by a huge amount (my wife loves it :). but i also really like the more in depth admin navigation offered by chx module. mixing both on my head setup gives a nice result, so may be it would be a good idea to join forces and mix the 2 panels. chx, is your module somewhat official and scheduled to hit the core ? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:24:11 +0000 : Amazon Hi, I asked Karoly to create the control panel module. It important that the control panel be tied into the navigation menu block so that it does not create inconsistent navigation. The goal is to start a user experience grouping exercise to help the community categorize administration tasks. The first thing that has to happen is that administration must be considered a seperate situation from creating personal content in Drupal. To support this seperation of personal tasks and administration tasks we broke out administration to have a separate theme in the CivicSpace theme. Through research interviews into Drupal administration we need to discover what the goals and tasks of administrators are. Some early feedback is that site developers need modules to be evaluated on Drupal.org. They have also indicated they need better and consistent administration help ,with incontext list, which we have been adding. We have also heard administrators want a quick overview. Any change to provide a control panel like overview must have a dashboard like overview. You should assume that we will identify a list of 5-7 top goals for administrators. Once those those 5-7 top goals are identified we need to ensure administrators can acommplish tasks to achieve those goals. Some of those tasks will completed by clicking through to icons or admin interface links. Sub-goals will be accomplished by providing effective navigation. We need to consider 4 types of navigation to be added to the control panel: Global navigation, local navigation, contextual navigation, and situational navigation. Some of this navigation can be accomplished through a theme or blocks. Some will need to be in the page and some need to be added in otherways, such as interaction techniques. Keep all this in mind when creating a control panel solution. It also must respond to the fact that every site will have different permissions set and different modules. This is a complex problem and it's going to research and experimentation to get it right. But this is a big step in the right direction. Cheers, Kieran ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:47:55 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system.module_11.patch (5.61 KB) This has sparked a lot of good discussion. I've taken a look at cp.module and I think it really is complimentary with my proposed patch. I've taken my patch one step further and provided the settings icons in a collapsable group below the main control panel. This would allow access to all admin functions without referring to the traditional menu. Syllance, do you think this addresses the gap you saw in my solution? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 20:33:10 +0000 : der Kieran, I'm glad to see some serious thought going into the user experience for site administrators. I think separating the user and admin sections of the site is critical. It will not only allow extensive usability work to be done for site admins it will also make it much easier for theme creators as they will be able to focus on the end user experience. I like the admin theme for civicspace. My only dislike about the approach is that it's template driven which causes a sites template to be larger and more complex due to handling all the logic for user and admin themes. I think a better approach may be to use a module such as the sections module. This allows you to have smaller templates focused on user or admin themes. I agree with your point about making sure the control panel ties into them menu system. My approach uses the existing menu structure so modules are added dynamically and all permissions are enforced. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:21:05 +0000 : chx <?php function _system_adminpage () { drupal_goto($path = variable_get('site_adminpage', 'admin/controlpanel'), $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL); } ?> no way. Use menu !$may_cache and set the path based on the variable. Adding in-line style elements is also a no-go. The code style is not kept. Never a space between full stop and apostrophe, always otherwise. It's not $menuvisible but $menu_visible I must be blind (it's 0:17am) but // Build the settings section of the control panel does not seem to differ from the previous section. A function may be appropriate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:39:40 +0000 : der Thanks for the code feedback. I'm assuming the extracted style info would get patched to drupal.css? Your right about the duplicate code. A function would make more sense, I'll make the change. I'm not sure about the comment to use "$may_cache" I've never used it before. What's it's purpose? How should I use it in this situation. I'll dig around and see if I can figure it out but I thought you might be able to give me a little insight. Thanks! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 10:41:00 +0000 : syllance der, i've checked the new version of your control panel, and it does simplify access to the settings menu (although with a complex setup, the site config collapsable menu goes a lot more down than the menu, but this a page and not a small menu so its still better) however, there other case settings like, such as the ecommerce modules, which provides a more complex menu tree (ex : store->settings->payment->adjustments, each with their own admin pages). these are not taken into account by your panel, leaving the menu mandatory. chx control panel handles this nicely with page navigation. going through the store menu with chx panel is a real pleasure while its a real pain with the menu. So i think the best would be to mix the two panels, chx one handling page navigation, and yours providing a frontend for basic admin pages, and collapsable site config items. instead of linking to the standard admin pages, icons might link to chx nav pages where there are sub entries. i'm running both today, and this already makes the admin really better, but i'm often switching from der panel to chx one (for store), so mixing both would be, for me, a very nice solution :p thanks for the good work :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:54:55 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel.patch (5.61 KB) Here's a new patch with the code reworked per chx's comments with the exception of his objection to my use of drupal_goto function. chx, I'm probably missing something really obvious but I'm not understanding your suggestion. Are you suggesting I use some menu function to do the redirect? If so, I could not find one that suits my needs. Or are you suggesting to use the drupal_goto function in a different manner than I am using it. Like I said, I'm probably missing something really obvious here but for the life of me I don't know what it is. Any further advice would be greatly appreciated. The offending code below: <?php function _system_adminpage () { drupal_goto($path = variable_get('site_adminpage', 'admin/controlpanel'), $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL); } ?> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 13:42:57 +0000 : syllance i think there's a problem with your latest patch. it seems to display all icons as a vertical list. it may be a problem with my setup, but i'm using basic themes that comes with head. the administer page is thus very long, and this is not very useful. previous version was better, imho :) thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:10:03 +0000 : der which theme and which browser are you using? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:59:16 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_0.patch (5.32 KB) I've tested this with IE and FireFox with each of the Drupal shipped HEAD themes and I'm not seeing the issue you described. Are you sure the patch applied correctly to drupal.css? Here's a slightly revised patch. It make the control panel icon group collapsable but open by default. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:09:22 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_1.patch (5.64 KB) Sorry for the excessive number of patches. I just realized that my previous patch had an issue with icon image file names if there were admin and admin/settings menu items that were the same (eg admin/user and admin/settings/user). New patch attached to address. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:13:49 +0000 : syllance the vertical thing was probably due to a problem with my drupal.css. i've tested your new patch with a fresh update and the display is fine, but there's a bug. the site configuration panel displays store settings items (checkout,payment,shipping), and not the global settings one. this might be due to the menus item having the same name 'settings', although not located at the same level (administer/settings, and administer/store/settings). ready for another patch ? :) your panel adds a nice look and enable default administer page setup. but there's still a lot of menu access needed when other modules are setup (such as ecommerce), and i'm using it in addition to chx one to provide a complete admin solution :) chx one looks just like the theme you're using with no icons, but it really help accelerating admin navigation. i'm wondering if integrating both to core wouldn't be the ultimate solution. your panel more targeted at standard admin needs, and chx one helping users that deals with lots of modules & settings. thanks again ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:19:54 +0000 : Amazon Hi, can you guys post some screen shots as you go along for those of us who don't want to keep installing new patches.

1 0

[drupal-devel] [feature] Administration Control Panel suggestion
by Amazon 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/31326 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/31326 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: system.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: der Updated by: Amazon Status: patch (code needs review) Hi, can you guys post some screen shots as you go along for those of us who don't want to keep installing new patches. Amazon Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:50:52 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system_9.patch (4.27 KB) New feature suggestion: I would like to suggest a couple of enhancments to administration pages. First, add a new general settings option to allow the user to specify the admin home page. Currently the watchdog log view is the default home page. Second, add a new control panel page that can be used as the default admin start page. I've attached a suggested patch to the CVS head version of the system.module that implements these two enhancements. The patch does the following. Adds a new "default admin page" text field to the general settings group (just after the "default front page"). It also changes the admin menu entry to call a new function that examines the default "admin page" variable and redirects to the appropriate path. For the control panel, the patch adds a new function (system_admin_controlpanel). This function basically looks for the admin entry in the menu structure and then iterates through the child menu items and builds a control panel page using the path and title information returned from the menu structure. For the control panel icons it looks for an icon file in the misc directory that matches the name of the menu item (e.g. user.png, access.png etc) If it doesn't find an icon it uses a default. I've also included some 48/48 icons that I borrowed from my usr/share/icon/gnome directory of my local Linux box. I believe these are gnome GPL'ed icons but any 48/48 icons could be used. This patch allows users who prefer the current functionality to keep it as their default. It provides the option for others to make any admin page they want to be their admin "home page" including using a graphical control panel. Module developers that add new admin menu options can add their own custom icons for the control panel but they are not "required" to do so as a default will be used if they don't provide one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:52:15 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal_controlpanel_icons.zip (39.09 KB) 48x48 icons attached ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:30:16 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system_2_0.patch (4.5 KB) updated patch. slightly changed the formatting of the control panel page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:37:24 +0000 : moggy I quite like this. It certainly goes some way to making Drupal easier on the eyes for first time users. I noticed there's a lot of hard coded style. Would this not be better in a stylesheet and the code just containing classes and ids? Also would a dropdown box of possible admin pages be better than trying to remember how to spell controlpanel (something I'm having trouble with tonight ;-) ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:02:08 +0000 : syllance Nice job :) the default admin page is a nice feature, and the controlpanel is a very good idea. This goes in the good direction to make Drupal more user friendly. i agree with the dropdown menu and stylesheet additions, but i already really appreciate the current version. hope this will go into core soon, as it really makes the first admin pages contact better :) i don't mind scrolling through the nav menu and i rarely goes into admin without checking the logs, but that definitely will help me converting my wife's site to drupal :p thanks ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:09:43 +0000 : der I'll move the styles off to a style sheet but I'm uncertain about whether or not make make the default admin page a dropdown. It's an easy change and it eliminates any typos by the user but it also restricts the user to a current visible admin menu item. If by chance someone wanted to write their own admin start page (ie their own control panel) they would have to hack the core system.module to do it. Anyone else want to weigh in with their preference? Also, anyone up for creating drupalized versions of the control panel icons? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:16:15 +0000 : chx Maybe just because I created it, I like my control panel module better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:25:30 +0000 : der If I would have known there was a module I wouldn't have written this patch although I do think this would be good for core Drupal as the default. Is your modules a recent creation? I don't see it on drupal.org nor could I find in the contribs section of CVS (either the modules or sandbox sections). I'm I missing something? Is it called something different? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:20:15 +0000 : syllance chx control panel is located in his sandbox (cp.module), and thanks to him for letting us know there's one :) it's working fine (tested on HEAD) and provide interesting concept for navigating through the admin, instead of just add a frontend. the settings part is the better one, listing all elements in the page makes quickly forget the standard menu. der's one looks nice and provide a more immediate access to admin pages, but the standard menu is still mandatory to access some elements (dba or store settings for example, still needs to be accessed via left menu). to be honest, i like them both :) being able to change the default admin page is very nice, and icons make admin looks a lot better, raising the Woman Acceptance Factor by a huge amount (my wife loves it :). but i also really like the more in depth admin navigation offered by chx module. mixing both on my head setup gives a nice result, so may be it would be a good idea to join forces and mix the 2 panels. chx, is your module somewhat official and scheduled to hit the core ? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:24:11 +0000 : Amazon Hi, I asked Karoly to create the control panel module. It important that the control panel be tied into the navigation menu block so that it does not create inconsistent navigation. The goal is to start a user experience grouping exercise to help the community categorize administration tasks. The first thing that has to happen is that administration must be considered a seperate situation from creating personal content in Drupal. To support this seperation of personal tasks and administration tasks we broke out administration to have a separate theme in the CivicSpace theme. Through research interviews into Drupal administration we need to discover what the goals and tasks of administrators are. Some early feedback is that site developers need modules to be evaluated on Drupal.org. They have also indicated they need better and consistent administration help ,with incontext list, which we have been adding. We have also heard administrators want a quick overview. Any change to provide a control panel like overview must have a dashboard like overview. You should assume that we will identify a list of 5-7 top goals for administrators. Once those those 5-7 top goals are identified we need to ensure administrators can acommplish tasks to achieve those goals. Some of those tasks will completed by clicking through to icons or admin interface links. Sub-goals will be accomplished by providing effective navigation. We need to consider 4 types of navigation to be added to the control panel: Global navigation, local navigation, contextual navigation, and situational navigation. Some of this navigation can be accomplished through a theme or blocks. Some will need to be in the page and some need to be added in otherways, such as interaction techniques. Keep all this in mind when creating a control panel solution. It also must respond to the fact that every site will have different permissions set and different modules. This is a complex problem and it's going to research and experimentation to get it right. But this is a big step in the right direction. Cheers, Kieran ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:47:55 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system.module_11.patch (5.61 KB) This has sparked a lot of good discussion. I've taken a look at cp.module and I think it really is complimentary with my proposed patch. I've taken my patch one step further and provided the settings icons in a collapsable group below the main control panel. This would allow access to all admin functions without referring to the traditional menu. Syllance, do you think this addresses the gap you saw in my solution? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 20:33:10 +0000 : der Kieran, I'm glad to see some serious thought going into the user experience for site administrators. I think separating the user and admin sections of the site is critical. It will not only allow extensive usability work to be done for site admins it will also make it much easier for theme creators as they will be able to focus on the end user experience. I like the admin theme for civicspace. My only dislike about the approach is that it's template driven which causes a sites template to be larger and more complex due to handling all the logic for user and admin themes. I think a better approach may be to use a module such as the sections module. This allows you to have smaller templates focused on user or admin themes. I agree with your point about making sure the control panel ties into them menu system. My approach uses the existing menu structure so modules are added dynamically and all permissions are enforced. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:21:05 +0000 : chx <?php function _system_adminpage () { drupal_goto($path = variable_get('site_adminpage', 'admin/controlpanel'), $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL); } ?> no way. Use menu !$may_cache and set the path based on the variable. Adding in-line style elements is also a no-go. The code style is not kept. Never a space between full stop and apostrophe, always otherwise. It's not $menuvisible but $menu_visible I must be blind (it's 0:17am) but // Build the settings section of the control panel does not seem to differ from the previous section. A function may be appropriate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:39:40 +0000 : der Thanks for the code feedback. I'm assuming the extracted style info would get patched to drupal.css? Your right about the duplicate code. A function would make more sense, I'll make the change. I'm not sure about the comment to use "$may_cache" I've never used it before. What's it's purpose? How should I use it in this situation. I'll dig around and see if I can figure it out but I thought you might be able to give me a little insight. Thanks! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 10:41:00 +0000 : syllance der, i've checked the new version of your control panel, and it does simplify access to the settings menu (although with a complex setup, the site config collapsable menu goes a lot more down than the menu, but this a page and not a small menu so its still better) however, there other case settings like, such as the ecommerce modules, which provides a more complex menu tree (ex : store->settings->payment->adjustments, each with their own admin pages). these are not taken into account by your panel, leaving the menu mandatory. chx control panel handles this nicely with page navigation. going through the store menu with chx panel is a real pleasure while its a real pain with the menu. So i think the best would be to mix the two panels, chx one handling page navigation, and yours providing a frontend for basic admin pages, and collapsable site config items. instead of linking to the standard admin pages, icons might link to chx nav pages where there are sub entries. i'm running both today, and this already makes the admin really better, but i'm often switching from der panel to chx one (for store), so mixing both would be, for me, a very nice solution :p thanks for the good work :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:54:55 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel.patch (5.61 KB) Here's a new patch with the code reworked per chx's comments with the exception of his objection to my use of drupal_goto function. chx, I'm probably missing something really obvious but I'm not understanding your suggestion. Are you suggesting I use some menu function to do the redirect? If so, I could not find one that suits my needs. Or are you suggesting to use the drupal_goto function in a different manner than I am using it. Like I said, I'm probably missing something really obvious here but for the life of me I don't know what it is. Any further advice would be greatly appreciated. The offending code below: <?php function _system_adminpage () { drupal_goto($path = variable_get('site_adminpage', 'admin/controlpanel'), $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL); } ?> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 13:42:57 +0000 : syllance i think there's a problem with your latest patch. it seems to display all icons as a vertical list. it may be a problem with my setup, but i'm using basic themes that comes with head. the administer page is thus very long, and this is not very useful. previous version was better, imho :) thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:10:03 +0000 : der which theme and which browser are you using? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:59:16 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_0.patch (5.32 KB) I've tested this with IE and FireFox with each of the Drupal shipped HEAD themes and I'm not seeing the issue you described. Are you sure the patch applied correctly to drupal.css? Here's a slightly revised patch. It make the control panel icon group collapsable but open by default. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:09:22 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_1.patch (5.64 KB) Sorry for the excessive number of patches. I just realized that my previous patch had an issue with icon image file names if there were admin and admin/settings menu items that were the same (eg admin/user and admin/settings/user). New patch attached to address. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:13:49 +0000 : syllance the vertical thing was probably due to a problem with my drupal.css. i've tested your new patch with a fresh update and the display is fine, but there's a bug. the site configuration panel displays store settings items (checkout,payment,shipping), and not the global settings one. this might be due to the menus item having the same name 'settings', although not located at the same level (administer/settings, and administer/store/settings). ready for another patch ? :) your panel adds a nice look and enable default administer page setup. but there's still a lot of menu access needed when other modules are setup (such as ecommerce), and i'm using it in addition to chx one to provide a complete admin solution :) chx one looks just like the theme you're using with no icons, but it really help accelerating admin navigation. i'm wondering if integrating both to core wouldn't be the ultimate solution. your panel more targeted at standard admin needs, and chx one helping users that deals with lots of modules & settings. thanks again

1 0

[drupal-devel] [feature] Administration Control Panel suggestion
by syllance 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/31326 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/31326 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: system.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: der Updated by: syllance Status: patch (code needs review) the vertical thing was probably due to a problem with my drupal.css. i've tested your new patch with a fresh update and the display is fine, but there's a bug. the site configuration panel displays store settings items (checkout,payment,shipping), and not the global settings one. this might be due to the menus item having the same name 'settings', although not located at the same level (administer/settings, and administer/store/settings). ready for another patch ? :) your panel adds a nice look and enable default administer page setup. but there's still a lot of menu access needed when other modules are setup (such as ecommerce), and i'm using it in addition to chx one to provide a complete admin solution :) chx one looks just like the theme you're using with no icons, but it really help accelerating admin navigation. i'm wondering if integrating both to core wouldn't be the ultimate solution. your panel more targeted at standard admin needs, and chx one helping users that deals with lots of modules & settings. thanks again syllance Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:50:52 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system_9.patch (4.27 KB) New feature suggestion: I would like to suggest a couple of enhancments to administration pages. First, add a new general settings option to allow the user to specify the admin home page. Currently the watchdog log view is the default home page. Second, add a new control panel page that can be used as the default admin start page. I've attached a suggested patch to the CVS head version of the system.module that implements these two enhancements. The patch does the following. Adds a new "default admin page" text field to the general settings group (just after the "default front page"). It also changes the admin menu entry to call a new function that examines the default "admin page" variable and redirects to the appropriate path. For the control panel, the patch adds a new function (system_admin_controlpanel). This function basically looks for the admin entry in the menu structure and then iterates through the child menu items and builds a control panel page using the path and title information returned from the menu structure. For the control panel icons it looks for an icon file in the misc directory that matches the name of the menu item (e.g. user.png, access.png etc) If it doesn't find an icon it uses a default. I've also included some 48/48 icons that I borrowed from my usr/share/icon/gnome directory of my local Linux box. I believe these are gnome GPL'ed icons but any 48/48 icons could be used. This patch allows users who prefer the current functionality to keep it as their default. It provides the option for others to make any admin page they want to be their admin "home page" including using a graphical control panel. Module developers that add new admin menu options can add their own custom icons for the control panel but they are not "required" to do so as a default will be used if they don't provide one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:52:15 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal_controlpanel_icons.zip (39.09 KB) 48x48 icons attached ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:30:16 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system_2_0.patch (4.5 KB) updated patch. slightly changed the formatting of the control panel page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:37:24 +0000 : moggy I quite like this. It certainly goes some way to making Drupal easier on the eyes for first time users. I noticed there's a lot of hard coded style. Would this not be better in a stylesheet and the code just containing classes and ids? Also would a dropdown box of possible admin pages be better than trying to remember how to spell controlpanel (something I'm having trouble with tonight ;-) ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:02:08 +0000 : syllance Nice job :) the default admin page is a nice feature, and the controlpanel is a very good idea. This goes in the good direction to make Drupal more user friendly. i agree with the dropdown menu and stylesheet additions, but i already really appreciate the current version. hope this will go into core soon, as it really makes the first admin pages contact better :) i don't mind scrolling through the nav menu and i rarely goes into admin without checking the logs, but that definitely will help me converting my wife's site to drupal :p thanks ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:09:43 +0000 : der I'll move the styles off to a style sheet but I'm uncertain about whether or not make make the default admin page a dropdown. It's an easy change and it eliminates any typos by the user but it also restricts the user to a current visible admin menu item. If by chance someone wanted to write their own admin start page (ie their own control panel) they would have to hack the core system.module to do it. Anyone else want to weigh in with their preference? Also, anyone up for creating drupalized versions of the control panel icons? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:16:15 +0000 : chx Maybe just because I created it, I like my control panel module better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:25:30 +0000 : der If I would have known there was a module I wouldn't have written this patch although I do think this would be good for core Drupal as the default. Is your modules a recent creation? I don't see it on drupal.org nor could I find in the contribs section of CVS (either the modules or sandbox sections). I'm I missing something? Is it called something different? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:20:15 +0000 : syllance chx control panel is located in his sandbox (cp.module), and thanks to him for letting us know there's one :) it's working fine (tested on HEAD) and provide interesting concept for navigating through the admin, instead of just add a frontend. the settings part is the better one, listing all elements in the page makes quickly forget the standard menu. der's one looks nice and provide a more immediate access to admin pages, but the standard menu is still mandatory to access some elements (dba or store settings for example, still needs to be accessed via left menu). to be honest, i like them both :) being able to change the default admin page is very nice, and icons make admin looks a lot better, raising the Woman Acceptance Factor by a huge amount (my wife loves it :). but i also really like the more in depth admin navigation offered by chx module. mixing both on my head setup gives a nice result, so may be it would be a good idea to join forces and mix the 2 panels. chx, is your module somewhat official and scheduled to hit the core ? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:24:11 +0000 : Amazon Hi, I asked Karoly to create the control panel module. It important that the control panel be tied into the navigation menu block so that it does not create inconsistent navigation. The goal is to start a user experience grouping exercise to help the community categorize administration tasks. The first thing that has to happen is that administration must be considered a seperate situation from creating personal content in Drupal. To support this seperation of personal tasks and administration tasks we broke out administration to have a separate theme in the CivicSpace theme. Through research interviews into Drupal administration we need to discover what the goals and tasks of administrators are. Some early feedback is that site developers need modules to be evaluated on Drupal.org. They have also indicated they need better and consistent administration help ,with incontext list, which we have been adding. We have also heard administrators want a quick overview. Any change to provide a control panel like overview must have a dashboard like overview. You should assume that we will identify a list of 5-7 top goals for administrators. Once those those 5-7 top goals are identified we need to ensure administrators can acommplish tasks to achieve those goals. Some of those tasks will completed by clicking through to icons or admin interface links. Sub-goals will be accomplished by providing effective navigation. We need to consider 4 types of navigation to be added to the control panel: Global navigation, local navigation, contextual navigation, and situational navigation. Some of this navigation can be accomplished through a theme or blocks. Some will need to be in the page and some need to be added in otherways, such as interaction techniques. Keep all this in mind when creating a control panel solution. It also must respond to the fact that every site will have different permissions set and different modules. This is a complex problem and it's going to research and experimentation to get it right. But this is a big step in the right direction. Cheers, Kieran ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:47:55 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/system.module_11.patch (5.61 KB) This has sparked a lot of good discussion. I've taken a look at cp.module and I think it really is complimentary with my proposed patch. I've taken my patch one step further and provided the settings icons in a collapsable group below the main control panel. This would allow access to all admin functions without referring to the traditional menu. Syllance, do you think this addresses the gap you saw in my solution? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 20:33:10 +0000 : der Kieran, I'm glad to see some serious thought going into the user experience for site administrators. I think separating the user and admin sections of the site is critical. It will not only allow extensive usability work to be done for site admins it will also make it much easier for theme creators as they will be able to focus on the end user experience. I like the admin theme for civicspace. My only dislike about the approach is that it's template driven which causes a sites template to be larger and more complex due to handling all the logic for user and admin themes. I think a better approach may be to use a module such as the sections module. This allows you to have smaller templates focused on user or admin themes. I agree with your point about making sure the control panel ties into them menu system. My approach uses the existing menu structure so modules are added dynamically and all permissions are enforced. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:21:05 +0000 : chx <?php function _system_adminpage () { drupal_goto($path = variable_get('site_adminpage', 'admin/controlpanel'), $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL); } ?> no way. Use menu !$may_cache and set the path based on the variable. Adding in-line style elements is also a no-go. The code style is not kept. Never a space between full stop and apostrophe, always otherwise. It's not $menuvisible but $menu_visible I must be blind (it's 0:17am) but // Build the settings section of the control panel does not seem to differ from the previous section. A function may be appropriate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 22:39:40 +0000 : der Thanks for the code feedback. I'm assuming the extracted style info would get patched to drupal.css? Your right about the duplicate code. A function would make more sense, I'll make the change. I'm not sure about the comment to use "$may_cache" I've never used it before. What's it's purpose? How should I use it in this situation. I'll dig around and see if I can figure it out but I thought you might be able to give me a little insight. Thanks! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 10:41:00 +0000 : syllance der, i've checked the new version of your control panel, and it does simplify access to the settings menu (although with a complex setup, the site config collapsable menu goes a lot more down than the menu, but this a page and not a small menu so its still better) however, there other case settings like, such as the ecommerce modules, which provides a more complex menu tree (ex : store->settings->payment->adjustments, each with their own admin pages). these are not taken into account by your panel, leaving the menu mandatory. chx control panel handles this nicely with page navigation. going through the store menu with chx panel is a real pleasure while its a real pain with the menu. So i think the best would be to mix the two panels, chx one handling page navigation, and yours providing a frontend for basic admin pages, and collapsable site config items. instead of linking to the standard admin pages, icons might link to chx nav pages where there are sub entries. i'm running both today, and this already makes the admin really better, but i'm often switching from der panel to chx one (for store), so mixing both would be, for me, a very nice solution :p thanks for the good work :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:54:55 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel.patch (5.61 KB) Here's a new patch with the code reworked per chx's comments with the exception of his objection to my use of drupal_goto function. chx, I'm probably missing something really obvious but I'm not understanding your suggestion. Are you suggesting I use some menu function to do the redirect? If so, I could not find one that suits my needs. Or are you suggesting to use the drupal_goto function in a different manner than I am using it. Like I said, I'm probably missing something really obvious here but for the life of me I don't know what it is. Any further advice would be greatly appreciated. The offending code below: <?php function _system_adminpage () { drupal_goto($path = variable_get('site_adminpage', 'admin/controlpanel'), $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL); } ?> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 13:42:57 +0000 : syllance i think there's a problem with your latest patch. it seems to display all icons as a vertical list. it may be a problem with my setup, but i'm using basic themes that comes with head. the administer page is thus very long, and this is not very useful. previous version was better, imho :) thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:10:03 +0000 : der which theme and which browser are you using? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:59:16 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_0.patch (5.32 KB) I've tested this with IE and FireFox with each of the Drupal shipped HEAD themes and I'm not seeing the issue you described. Are you sure the patch applied correctly to drupal.css? Here's a slightly revised patch. It make the control panel icon group collapsable but open by default. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:09:22 +0000 : der Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/control_panel_1.patch (5.64 KB) Sorry for the excessive number of patches. I just realized that my previous patch had an issue with icon image file names if there were admin and admin/settings menu items that were the same (eg admin/user and admin/settings/user). New patch attached to address.

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[drupal-devel] [feature] menu.module feature: visible in breadcrumb, but not visible in tree
by DFG 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/29621 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/29621 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: menu system Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: DFG Reported by: DFG Updated by: DFG Status: patch (code needs review) Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/menu.module_0.patch (3.9 KB) I wonder that it isn't (until now) possible to add menu items, that are visible in the breadcrumb but not in the menu tree. You need this e.g. if you don't want to overbloat the menu, while have pages with subpages that have also subpages and so on. The menu system is already capable of this feature, but I am speaking about menu.module, that is missing a way to configure this. I added checkboxes, so that you have e.g. (the following is the default): [x] Visible in tree [ ] Expanded [x] Visible in breadcrumb You now have these checkboxes when editing an item in admin/menu, but also in the new menu (on-the-fly) group when adding/editing a node. I have a technical description of the changes that my patch will commit, but also many screenshots, that show what is possible and how the changes look. I start with the screenshots: (1) http://d-f-g.net/drupal/menu-module-patch/node-view.png Here you can see a very long breadcrumb, that was configured using the menu module. The menu tree on the left is expanded until the last menu item with the MENU_VISIBLE_IN_TREE flag. (2) http://d-f-g.net/drupal/menu-module-patch/phpmyadmin-menu-table.png This is the interesting part of the menu table, viewed with phpmyadmin. (3) http://d-f-g.net/drupal/menu-module-patch/node-add.png (4) http://d-f-g.net/drupal/menu-module-patch/node-edit.png (5) http://d-f-g.net/drupal/menu-module-patch/admin-menu.png (6) http://d-f-g.net/drupal/menu-module-patch/admin-menu-edit.png ------------------------------------------------------------------ Technical description, all changes in menu.module ------------------------------------------------------------------ - added 2 checkboxes in menu_edit_item_form(): - checkbox "Expanded" was already there - checkboxes: added "Visible in tree" and "Visible in breadcrumb" - used the same coding style as for "Expanded" - added handling of the 2 new checkboxes in menu_edit_item_save(): - used the same handling style as for "Expanded" - menu_overview_tree_rows(): - the t('edit') button is no longer bound to MENU_VISIBLE_IN_TREE - instead to (MENU_VISIBLE_IN_TREE | MENU_VISIBLE_IN_BREADCRUMB) - added the 3 checkboxes in menu_node_form(): - this is the menu otf section (some call it so). the checkboxes should not be missed there. - menu_parent_options() and menu_overview_tree_rows(): - t('disabled') no longer bound to !& MENU_VISIBLE_IN_TREE (see the code...) - instead to !& (MENU_VISIBLE_IN_TREE | MENU_VISIBLE_IN_BREADCRUMB) ------------------------------------------------------------------ Best regards, DFG DFG

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[drupal-devel] [bug] node_load, missing drupal_unpack leaves fields serialized
by syllance 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/31691 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/31691 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: node.module Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: syllance Updated by: syllance Status: patch (code needs review) Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/node_load-unpackfix.patch (855 bytes) node_load function in node.module does not call drupal_unpack after retrieving node and author user informations. author user 'data' field is thus still serialized, and author prefs cannot be accessed as usual. this leads to issues on modules using node's author 'data' fields (link hook in privatemsg, which access author prefs to display link or not). the drupal_unpack is done in 4.6, but not in head, and this is not described as a change on the update module handbook page, so i'm submitting this potential issue. patch to add the missing call is attached (this fixes the issue with privatemsg link hook). please review and apply the patch if necessary. syllance

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[drupal-devel] [bug] Comment pager not working in cvs?
by leafish_dylan 20 Sep '05

20 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/26031 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/26031 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: comment.module Category: bug reports Priority: critical Assigned to: leafish_dylan Reported by: leafish_dylan Updated by: leafish_dylan Status: patch (code needs review) Oh, okay. I wish I'd seen your patch before I hunted this bug down myself, but thanks anyway. You're right, the comment module is very broken right now. Most of the problems are related to the pager or the comment options box, but there are limitations with this module that are really quite suprising. Can we still not delete a single comment in a thread, for example? This is evil, and wrong. leafish_dylan Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 29 Jun 2005 23:43:10 +0000 : leafish_dylan I've just upgraded a 4.6.1 site to CVS and there's no comment pager on nodes with more than $comments_per_page. Is this a bug, or it it one of my modules? I've tested the site with various other themes, including the defaults. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 04 Jul 2005 23:41:03 +0000 : leafish_dylan Can anybody confirm this? I can't find the problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 15 Jul 2005 12:35:14 +0000 : leafish_dylan Hello? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 23 Aug 2005 14:12:16 +0000 : Uwe Hermann Confirmed in HEAD. The problem is here (comment.module, comment_render()): if ($pager = theme('pager', NULL, $comments_per_page, 0, array('comments_per_page' => $comments_per_page))) { $output .= $pager; } The $pager variable is empty (for whatever reason), hence no pager is generated. I didn't debug this any further... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 09 Sep 2005 21:11:26 +0000 : leafish_paul Confirmed here too - can any one take a look at this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:52:20 +0000 : leafish_dylan Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/comment.module_30.patch (1.02 KB) Comment paging has been broken in CVS for at least 3 months, yet only one other person has noticed this? Here's a patch to fix the bug... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:21:36 +0000 : tostinni I also posted a patch there [1]. But there's still some major bug with comments... [1] http://drupal.org/node/26966#comment-41012

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[drupal-devel] [drupal-dev] default module paths
by GravyFace 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

I'm curious: how are default module paths assigned? I checked all the database tables that I thought would have this information but I can't find anything. Specifically, I'm wondering how the Event module is setup at $base_url/event/foo/bar by default; I'd like to change this.

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[drupal-devel] [feature] Replace core archive.module w/ codemonkeyx archive.module
by Norrin 19 Sep '05

19 Sep '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/29676 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/29676 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: archive.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Morbus Iff Reported by: Morbus Iff Updated by: Norrin Status: patch (ready to be committed) Hmmmpfff. Ok, sorry for disturbing. I'm out of here ... ;-) Norrin Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 25 Aug 2005 21:08:49 +0000 : Morbus Iff Over at http://drupal.org/node/8287, Berkes mentions that the core archive.module was considered being removed, per a discussion at the Drupal Sprint. Kjartan also mentions he would "love to have the archive module improved in general." In chatting with chx about this, he mentioned codemonkeyx's rewrite sitting in contrib/modules/archive/. I'll be doing some work with the archive.module over the next few days, and will be basing my changes around codemonkeyx's version, and making it compatible with HEAD. This general Issue is to move codemonkeyx's version into HEAD as a replacement to the existing archive.module. An unknown version of his replacement can be seen at http://www.codemonkeyx.net/archive. I'll be running a live HEAD version soon as well. These patches were made during the customization of Drupal by http://www.NHPR.org. In loving support of open source software, http://www.NHPR.org will continue to contribute patches they feel the community will benefit from. Questions about this patch should be directed to morbus(a)disobey.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 26 Aug 2005 19:45:59 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues_2 (9.56 KB) As an example of a very early revision, see the attached, with the following changes from the current contrib CVS: * removed the year offset from theme_archive_navigation_years, which controlled how many year links to show at once in the top nav. For those with sites with more than five years, they'll WANT people to notice that they have five years, not to have to click on the earliest date and then have their expectations changed. * made the "created > $date" in archive_buildQuery "created >= $date" instead, to allow posts that were created at exactly midnight that day (like me, by design). * since there's no block, I made the menu item visible upon first load. this menu item is given "access content" permissions. More to come, including doxygen and gmt considerations. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 26 Aug 2005 19:47:41 +0000 : Morbus Iff Might as well start getting a review of it so I can fix 'em as they come in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 26 Aug 2005 19:56:49 +0000 : Tobias Maier cant you provide a patch file? thanks for your work ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 26 Aug 2005 20:04:01 +0000 : Morbus Iff The codemonkeyx version is a complete rewrite of the core archive.module. If I were to create a patch file against core, every line would be deleted, and every line would be new. Once I finish my revisions to codemonkey's version, I'll post the final version here, as well as a patch against his current CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 26 Aug 2005 20:09:13 +0000 : Tobias Maier ok, thanks again :D ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 13:41:43 +0000 : Junyor +1 for this change. The archive.module in core is dead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:14:30 +0000 : adrian What is the progress on this morbus ? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:29:13 +0000 : Morbus Iff Adrian - I'll be attaching a new version either later today or tomorrow, with a CHANGELOG. I'll also be running a live version of it over on NHPR.org for people to play with. The three major things I'm worried about right now are a) doxygen, b) variable/function naming, c) GMT considerations. After those, I'll be exploring a patch for my own needs: the ability to get archives for particular term. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 18:53:34 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/archive.module (9.93 KB) Here's the latest, with the following changelog: * reordered some routines to be a little more workflowish. * renamed archive_buildQuery to archive_build_query. * general whitespace and formatting cleanup. * HEADish update: returning $output, not page templating it. * removed the reference of &$ad in archive_build_query. * test for the existence of arg(#)'s before validating them. * archive_validSomething changed to archive_valid_something. * removed unused vars: cur_date, cur_date_end. * renamed archive_buildURL to archive_build_url. * removed the HTML whitespace from the theming. * twiddled a lot of quotes and apostraphes. * removed 'future' CSS class. ill-defined. * reordered/renamed the CSS classes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 18:54:08 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_p_29676_archive_css.patch (1.56 KB) And the drupal.css patch. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 18:56:29 +0000 : Morbus Iff This version of the module is currently running live at http://www.nhpr.org/archive/. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 19:59:57 +0000 : Tobias Maier if i click for example on 2003 it would be good if this would go to january or december and marks them that this one will be shown now as you can see it if you click on january 2003. it has to select * on the first: the first month of writing * on the last: the last month of writing * on every else: january I hope you can understand what I mean... greets tobias ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 20:17:40 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/archive_0.module (11.28 KB) Alright. I've attached another new version that adds a new feature that wasn't part of the original codemonkeyx CVS, but was chatted about on the devel list back in April. If this particular feature has bad code or needs heavy refactoring, certainly consider ONLY the version in comment #9 (and the matching drupal.css patch in #10). This new version supports dated archives based on taxonomy tids. It was a quick addition which NHPR.org needed (for the date nav; the normal tid archive pager wasn't strong enough for our needs). Since it was a quick addition, it supports only ONE tid at a time - the 'and/or' syntax for the taxonomy.module was not brought over. If that syntax was desired, it'd make more sense to create some sort of API for archive.module so that other nodes can take advantage of the dated nav in their normal pages (like node types, users, forums, etc.) The added code supports term matches at any granularity: # all node types that match tid 15000 ('The Front Porch') http://www.nhpr.org/archive/term/15000 # all 2005 node types that match tid 20 ('Health') http://www.nhpr.org/archive/2005/term/20 # all March, 2003 node types that match tid 9 ('Education') http://www.nhpr.org/archive/2003/3/term/9 # all July 11, 2003 node types that match tid 49 ('Economy') http://morbus.totalnetnh.net/nhpr/archive/2002/7/11/term/49 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 20:27:26 +0000 : Tobias Maier what does this mean? "Story Archives of 'archives' " on http://www.nhpr.org/archive/term/15000 should this maybe named? "Archive of 'The Front Porch'" if I go to http://www.nhpr.org/archive/term/20 I can only read "archives"... why is there a difference? - I never tested this module on my test site, because I'm not at home - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 20:29:34 +0000 : Morbus Iff Tobias: that wouldn't be possible, at least not accurately. The new archive.module supports browsing by year, month, and day, as you know. archive/2005 loads up all the data from a particular year and starts creating a pager out of it. Consider if you have 3 posts in December, and 15 posts in November. It wouldn't be "right" to highlight December because the pager display for the entire year would also include some of November's entries (since 3 is less than the pager increment). Likewise, if we ONLY showed the items from December, then we wouldn't have a "pager by year" feature, only a "pager by month (defaulting to December when none is selected)" feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 20:30:41 +0000 : Morbus Iff Tobias: regarding #14, that's an artifact of the templates that I'm using for NHPR, and has nothing to do with archive.module itself (in fact, once the anonymous cache expires, you'll see that little oopsie go away). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 29 Aug 2005 20:31:47 +0000 : Tobias Maier I can see your right :) I hope it comes in HEAD before tomorrow :D ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:20:12 +0000 : dtan I apologize if this is already a known issue. http://www.nhpr.org/archive/2005/9 does not create a link for september 1st, even though there are 2 nodes listed (http://www.nhpr.org/archive/2005/9/1) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:11:21 +0000 : Morbus Iff dtan: I'm pretty sure I know what this is - I'll address it either later today or tomorrow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 30 Aug 2005 20:49:58 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/archive_1.module (11.53 KB) Alright, I've attached a new archive.module - this is the version WITH term filtering enabled. I can make one without terms if necessary - otherwise, I'll just work from this one for now. This version fixes the bug that dtan saw, as a well as a bunch of other off-by-one errors. Of primary importance, however, is that all mktime's that mattered have been switched to gmmktime, which was one of the oft-reported Issues with the old archive.module. I want to eyeball them all again and make sure they're right though. The URLs from #13 are still operational and the CSS from #10 is still required. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 00:02:06 +0000 : Morbus Iff In testing with a few people in #drupal, we've discovered a much bigger problem, which affects this rewritten module as well as the current core archive.module. In a nutshell, the node.created time is stored with time(). PHP's time() bases itself on the server time, NOT on GMT. Thus, for archive.module to work correctly, it must ALWAYS use mktime (relative to server time) and never consider the $user->timezone (relative to GMT). For archive.module, this would cause dates to always be considered via server time, which isn't good, but is better than the craziness going on now. Alternatively, we could try to convert server time to GMT first, and then work with that. The proper solution is to fix node.module to use gmmktime without any arguments for node.created, then have an update path that modifies all node .created and .modified values to GMT, not server time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 05:53:51 +0000 : Junyor Since that is also a problem with the old archive.module, I don't see why it should stop this from getting into core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 06:37:28 +0000 : stefan nagtegaal "Since that is also a problem with the old archive.module, I don't see why it should stop this from getting into core. " Well, I think it's better to only accept the best code rather than accepting bugs getting in core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 07:05:51 +0000 : Kobus I am with Junyor on this. If this can be fixed, great, but if not, it's not a train smash, as the old one exhibits the same problem. I say add the new archive module, if there are no other ciritical bugs with it. It is much more robust and usable than the old one. We desperately need a new archive module. I couldn't find any other bugs while testing with the links Morbus posted. I don't have a HEAD installation anywhere, so can't test it locally at this moment. Regards, Kobus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 07:07:49 +0000 : Kobus BTW, code freeze means no new code added, right? Can't this module put in Core as is for the code freeze and the bug sorted out before the official release? Or is that just mean of me to suggest that? Kobus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 07:13:09 +0000 : Junyor Stefan: The bug is already in core, since node.module is in core. Archive.module (old and new!) just shows that bug. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 07:20:35 +0000 : Tobias Maier I want to have it in core for 4.7, too!!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 07:25:24 +0000 : stefan nagtegaal Junyor: I know that.. Though I think it's not good to accept code which we are aware of that it has bugs in it.. Offcourse this is very double, because drupal contains (probably) a lot of bugs, only they weren't spotted yet.. But, accepting code which has bugs in unacceptable imo.. For example, the node revisions patch had almost 40 reviews/rewritings from Gerhard and several others before it was accepted to be in core.. If we do not allow bugs to go into core, we don't have to bughunt and fix later which is a good thing.. So, imo we should first sort out the problem, then discuss what the best way is to fix the problem, and after that Squeeze that moron! ;-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 09:11:06 +0000 : adrian I vote we include this module, and open up a new issue for the bug. It's not archive's fault that this occurs, it is just showing the data it has access to. The bug already exists in core too. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 13:50:59 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/archive_2.module (10.63 KB) Attached is a new, and most likely final, version of the archive.module. I've removed all user->timezone references - all date determinations are based on server time, which is also the time used in the "created" column of the node table. This is "more accurate" than what the core archive.module currently does (which'll always be wrong because it's treating server time as GMT, which isn't always the case). When node.module does start saving times as GMT properly, archive.module will have be to be tweaked with timezones and blah blah blah. I did fiddle around with determining the server offset in an attempt to get to a GMT base, but I didn't have much luck with that. The NHPR.org URLs above are still valid for testing. I need testers and reviewers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 14:55:16 +0000 : m3avrck I get these two PHP errors when I have *no* content in my Drupal install (just did a clean install to test it): warning: mktime() [<a href='function.mktime'>function.mktime</a>]: Windows does not support negative values for this function in websites\drupal_cvs\drupal\modules\archive.module on line 274. warning: date() [<a href='function.date'>function.date</a>]: Windows does not support dates prior to midnight (00:00:00), January 1, 1970 in websites\drupal_cvs\drupal\modules\archive.module on line 274. Once I add content, these go away. Need some better checks to make sure if there is *no* content you don't get weird errors and what not :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 14:55:45 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_p_29676_archive_css_0.patch (1.56 KB) Updated drupal.css patch for HEAD. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 15:26:01 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/archive_3.module (10.75 KB) Attached is the complete module, fixed for m3avrck's #31. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 17:30:36 +0000 : m3avrck Reviewed patch and further test, running great over here! Definetly +1 for this one! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:03:36 +0000 : Morbus Iff Note: The NHPR folks preferred their archives to be sorted from earliest to latest (SQL ASC vs. DESC) for month/day listings, so no longer use the NHPR.org URLs above as representative of the module itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:26:37 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal.css (10.35 KB) CVS updated for HEAD again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:27:00 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_p_29676_archive_css_1.patch (1.56 KB) GRRR. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 08 Sep 2005 20:18:48 +0000 : m3avrck Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/archive_0.patch (20.72 KB) Rerolled patch against head. Also created one patch that fixes both archive.module and drupal.css so it's a clean and simple process now :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 08 Sep 2005 20:23:55 +0000 : m3avrck Just retested with the latest patch I made, applies cleanly against HEAD and *everything* works great and looks great too. No errors of any kind, even works on PHP 5.0.5 with no call by reference errors, :D Let's get this baby in! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 08 Sep 2005 21:26:06 +0000 : Souvent22 +1. I like the new patch, makes things easier to patch. Very slick. I like the break down of years, to months, to days. Very nice. Ready to go I say. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 12 Sep 2005 18:55:56 +0000 : m3avrck Bump to the top, freeze coming soon!!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:05:21 +0000 : Cvbge So, pgsql does not have FROM_UNIXTIME nor MONTH functions... I'd prefer, if it is possibile, to change the query to not use this mysql-specific functions, then writing pgsql specific equivalents... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:39:20 +0000 : Dries It might be me, but visually, I like the little calendar block better. Though, this new (slightly ugly) widget is easier to navigate. I'd like to postpone this patch until after 4.7. While nice, I'm not convinced this is the right approach. Like, adding the term-magic to the archive module is more of a hack than anything else. What's next, adding a uid-check so you can filter by user ID? Or a type check so you can filter by node type? Ultimately this should be merged into the tracker module, or better yet, into a generic "query string to node query"-mechanism. (I've outlined this elsewhere in the issues.) There is also a bunch of very minor code issues that need to be looked at. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 13 Sep 2005 19:06:57 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/archive_4.module (11.18 KB) I've attached an updated version, which includes gmmktime + user->timezones, as well as changing all date()'s to format_date()'s. As for nodetypes/users, actually, yeah, NHPR.org is interested in those filter functionalities too (and actually wanted them a few weeks ago). Haven't yet addressed the PSQL stuff from Cvbge. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 13 Sep 2005 19:09:46 +0000 : Morbus Iff I'm not entirely convinced that this should be part of tracker.module - the tracker module is to "track changes" or to "track updates". That's an entire different problem than archived data, which probably hasn't been changed for months or even years. I'd hate to see the tracker view applied to an archive system - I could care less about the titles of a blog post (which are usually piss-poor), especially when most *entire* blog posts are small enough to fit into the teaser that the archive.module shows. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 05:45:57 +0000 : Boris Mann Dries, I agree with Morbus. I can see what you're thinking with tracker (I think) -- have it handle read/unread for all sorts of stuff, in which case you'll want all sorts of filters. Archive is the place where all content can be navigated primarily by date. Let's commit this rather than live with the current completely useless archive.module for another entire release cycle. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 06:45:23 +0000 : Bèr Kessels Dries, I can see your point. The navigation interfce feels odd. But after some time I found this UI to be VERY good. it just feels odd because you are used to a calendar, yet this really is a better interface for browsing dates. It requires less clicks, offers all possible options in one glance etc. If we don't go for this archive module. Then please pretty please, remove at least the other one from core. It is completely useless as Boris states Better that people must use contribs than something that makes us look like we code crappy modules for core. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 08:14:06 +0000 : Kobus It would be very sad indeed if this is not included in 4.7! I will definately replace it on all my local sites though. I understand the concern that the new widget is not as pretty as the old one, but in my opinion it is the "resistance to change" that speaks here. We're so used to think that an archive is square-ish, that this wide rectangle is a bit awkward at first. The gain in usefulness and easier navigation is totally making up for that. It also gives a clearer overview of a time-frame than is currently the case, so all in all, I am +1 for this. Regards, Kobus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 08:17:51 +0000 : stefan nagtegaal Because I would like to to see this hit trunk as much as you all, I'll volunteer that _after_ this is in, I'll have a look if we can refactor/spice up the default looking of the new archive.module.. So Dries, any other concerns you have left? ;-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:44:14 +0000 : m3avrck I agree with said points, this module really cleans things up and works so much better. Let's get this in now and we still have a few weeks before 4.7 ships. We can deal with any outstanding bugs then... not that these are really any *new* bugs since they already exist in CVS. Not to mention this also fixes a slew of bugs with the current archive.module, so based on that, I think this one should be included. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:18:05 +0000 : Morbus Iff Very minor changes in this version: slightly different comments and a " to ' conversion. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:19:12 +0000 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/archive_5.module (11.18 KB) Grr. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:02:38 +0000 : Norrin What do I do wrong? I installed the 'archive_5.module' from the post before. But when I call 'http://www.examplesite.com/archive' all I get is a blank page. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:14:09 +0000 : Morbus Iff Norrin - you'll also need the CSS patch in #36, but that wouldn't cause what you're seeing. What HEAD are you running? A week old? Two weeks old? Today? What's your PHP error log say (assuming some sort of error reporting is enabled). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:23:50 +0000 : m3avrck Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal_21.patch (21.2 KB) Here's a patch (new archive module and CSS rolled into one). Updated against current HEAD. Still working great, let's get this in and get rid of the useless one there :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:31:55 +0000 : Norrin What do you mean by HEAD? I'm running the 4.6.3 version of drupal. There is no error. I simply get a page with the following source code html body /body /html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:35:32 +0000 : Morbus Iff Norrin - this Issue is for the development version of Drupal. It will not work with 4.6.3.

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