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[drupal-devel] [feature] Improve functionality of block generation for book module
by Dries 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: book.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: nysus Reported by: nysus Updated by: Dries Status: patch The menu is recreated every time a book page is updated. I believe this is unwanted behavior because it requires the book block to be reconfigured upon every update. Dries Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 08:12 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_19.patch (4.85 KB) Attached is a patch for the book module that does the following: 1) Allows book blocks to appear on any page at any time, not just when a node from the book is being viewed. 2) Allows multiple book blocks to appear on the same page. This functionality is achieved by the automatic creation of individual blocks for each book when the book is created. Simply enable the book's block to enjoy the benefits of 1 & 2 above. If the blocks are not enabled, the blocks will appear only when a node from that block is being viewed (the same way it works now). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 14:35 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_19_1.patch (4.84 KB) +1 This is great. A good many people have asked for something like this, and I think its a nice solution. But in the end this isn't up to me. One minor error in the patch... + $result = db_query('SELECT n.title, b.block, b.nid FROM {book} b INNER JOIN {node} n on n.nid = b.nid WHERE b.parent = 0'); b.block is not a valid field in this query. this updated patch removes reference to it. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 15:54 : nysus Glad you like it and thanks for fixing that up. It was left over from an older version of my patch. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 15:54 : andremolnar Steve, If I apply this patch, and I attempt to configure one of the newly created blocks. I noticed that for some reason the block.module is returning "true" at line 249 (of the block module)- and is creating a form for module-specific configuration. But all that shows up on the screen is the word "array". Can you trace this back to see why - and maybe update the patch. I can continue to test your changes - anything to help this patch make it into core. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 17:29 : nysus Hmmm...probably because I tested my patch on my version of Drupal, version 4.5.1. I'm having no problems. Are you using a cvs version of Drupal to test. If so, I'll set up cvs on my site and track this down. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 20:53 : drumm See http://drupal.org/node/12347 for information on how the block system has been updated. When I saw that the elseif ($op == 'view') was taken out I knew immedaitely that there was something weird about this patch. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 20:58 : nysus OK, thanks for the tip. Sorry for the confusion. Still kind of new to making open source contributions and it's easy for me to overlook some obvious stuff like this. I'll fix this up when I get a chance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 21:06 : Dries Please do, because this being a new feature, it has no chance getting committed to the DRUPAL-4-5 branch. The DRUPAL-4-5 branch is in bugfix-mode. New features go into CVS HEAD. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 00:32 : Dries There is quite a bit of duplicated code in the patch. Maybe it can be simplified (using a function)? Either way, it is a little weird. I haven't tried the path, and I'm not sure I understood the description. It's somewhat vague. Is the book module exporting multiple blocks that are nearly identical, yet have different display behavior? If so, why not add a simple block configuration setting to the original book block? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 04:51 : nysus Dries, Yes, there is some code that can be factored out and some general cleaning up that can be done. It was a little tricky to write so I left it kind of ragged around the edges until I'm sure there are no bugs. It has worked very well on 4.5.1 but I obviously need to update it to work with cvs. I'll be on that soon. As far as what it does: 1) For every new book that a user creates, a new block is associated with it. So if you create "Book A", "Book B", "Book C", you will get three new blocks visible on the block administration page called "Book A", "Book B", "Book C". The original "Book Navigation" block is still there, too. The functionality of the "Book Navigation" block is not affected at all by this patch. 2) If Book A's block is enabled, the block containing its menu will appear not only when a node within Book A is viewed, but at all times (unless the user suppresses it on certain pages with the "path" feature). When any node is that is NOT in Book A is viewed, Book A's menu still appears but it is fully collapsed. When a node that DOES belong to Book A is viewed, Book A's Book menu expands accordingly. 3) The user can also enable Book B & C's block, and have their menus appear in a block at all times as well. 4) If none of the book's blocks are enabled by the user, the module will behave just as it did without the patch. That is, when the "Book Navigation" block is enabled, the only time any book menu will appear is when a book node is being viewed. 5) It's important to note (and this was the tricky part to write) that if both the "Book Navigation" block is enabled and "Book A" is enabled, they will play nice with each other and not do nasty things like create the same book menu twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 07:51 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_20.patch (5.37 KB) Andre, Attached is a new patch that will resolve the problem of the block-specific stuff showing on the block configuration form. Let me know if you spot any other bugs. If it looks good to you, I'll go to work making the code look leaner and prettier. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 09:26 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_21.patch (4 KB) Dries, Andre: Here is a new and improved streamlined version of the patch. Have a look if you get a chance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 10:11 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_22.patch (4.15 KB) Found a bug in the last version that would cause the block to jump to a different location. I think this should do it. Everything appear to work well (famous last words). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 16:49 : andremolnar Steve: bugs appear to be gone, and I didn't run across any other errors. This is functioning exactly as described. everyone: I personally would encourage support for this functionality. Book is a powerful navigation building tool in a site, not only with its ability to move next and back through a hierarchy of pages - but also its ability to build the appropriate navigation block without further user intervention (unlike the admin features in the menu module or taxonomy). The most frequently cited complaint about the book module is its inflexibility when it comes to when and where the block shows up. I also frequently hear requests for the ability to show multiple book blocks at the same time. Up until now the best alternatives suggested required users to do a hack (e.g. build a custom block that calls such and such a hook). Most abandon their request at that point because its over their heads. With this patch all those requests are covered and more. Now all books can automatically have their own block and admins can easily decide when and where each of those individual blocks show up (left right, up down) and coupled with the new configuration features of the block module - its very easy for admins to decide on which individual pages a block will show up. I would be interested what other have to say about this feature. My only reservation (which is minor compared to the benefits of the functionality offered) is that there is no way to turn this functionality off. i.e. The default behaviour is to build individual blocks for each book. If there could be a way to toggle this feature on and off somewhere - it would be perfect. Still, AS IS - this is a major improvement and offers great flexibility to admins and site creators. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 17:04 : Anonymous Andre, Thanks for the feedback on the usefulness of this module. Glad I could pitch in and help. I agree about the inability to turn the feature on/off and I was thinking about that myself. I think it could easily be accomplished by creating a checkbox in the "book navigation" block individual configuration's settings. Call it "Enable individual book blocks." When enabled, the individual book blocks will appear on the block administration menu. One question: Where would the state of this checkbox get saved? Has Drupal moved away from serializing data in the data base? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 20:36 : Dries I'm afraid that 'Enable individual book blocks.' is not descriptive/clear at all. Are you suggesting a setting to toggle between 'show block on all pages' and 'show block on book pages only'? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 21:45 : nysus Dries, No. Andre and I suggest a setting within the "Book Navigation" cofiguration page, that would toggle whether or not individual books appear on the list of all blocks on the block administration page. Hence the name 'Enable individual book navigation blocks.' The help text for this checkbox might read something like: "By default, a book's navigation block is visible only when a page from that book is being viewed. Check this box if you want more control over where and when an book's navigation block is visible. You will then be able to control the book's navigation block location and visibility settings on the "admin/block" page." Hope this makes it pretty clear. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 22:08 : Dries I understand what you are trying to do, but not how you are trying to do it, or how the setting is supposed to work. I guess I'll have to try it when a new patch lands. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 11:52 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_23.patch (5.02 KB) Alright, fellas, I'm proud to unveil my crowning achievement in the open source development world (no big deal to most of you guys but pretty good for a hack like me). Thanks for all the input so far. It's been helpful. I've streamlined the heck out of it per Dries suggestion and I've created an option to turn this functionality on an off per Andre's suggestion. Does this look good to you guys? Anything else I have to fix or improve? Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 15:02 : Dries I tried the patch. It works great but to me, the 'Give books their own block' settings seems to be redundant. Why not export the current book navigation block, along with an additional block for each book? Looks a lot simpler to me. I think I spotted a bug: orphaned book pages (or possibly book pages that are unpublished) appear to be getting book navigation blocks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 19:34 : nysus I'll see if I can fix the bug. Might be tricky. But I don't understand your recommendation to "export the current book navigation block, along with an additional block for each book". Can you expand on this thought? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 20:06 : nysus Dries, I am unable to duplicate the bug. I have three orphaned pages. I also tried unpublishing some pages. But as far as I can tell, the patch works as expected. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 21:00 : Dries If you can't reproduce the problem, chances are my node/book table is somewhat fubar. As for the configuration option. I suggest removing it and to always make these new blocks available on the /admin/block configuration screen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 21:52 : moshe weitzman I am hoping that we maintain the option to keep the behavior where the appropriate book block only shows up when its book page viewed. this is a nice, tidy arrangement. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 22:03 : nysus Yes, if you don't enable any of the individual book blocks, the a book's block (i.e. navigation menu) will only appear when a page in a book is viewed. In other words, you have the option to have the book block act like this patch isn't even installed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 22:54 : Dries I guess I'll have to try the patch again, because I don't understand why it works like this -- or at least, why it can't be made simpler. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 23:13 : nysus Can you be more specific? Why it works like what? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 23:24 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_24.patch (4.1 KB) This patch reverses a change made in the last patch which required a user to enable individual book block before they could enable any individual book blocks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 23:41 : andremolnar As I mentioned earlier I am *fine* with either version of this patch as long as it makes it to core. But, as I said earlier, I clearly think the preference for admins would be to have the option to enable or disable this functionality. BTW - if this does make it in, I would be happy to create a Handbook page that describes the new features - something like "how to build robust site navigation using the book module". (on or after December 17th). andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 14:11 : Anonymous I am not at all happy with these features. They are incosistant, confusing and should use exising methods and UIs. May main concern is the incosistancy: it is confusing, will require extra attention with each core code change, adds extra logic to the core, and is not re-useable. so here are my questions: 1) why do we not use the menu system and apis to build and adminster the trees? Saves code, does not add extra UIs, and gives users more power. 2) why do we need that extra showing logic? a book block should not get exeptional if clauses, it should use the existing path setting methods on block admin. extra logic is confusing for administrators (hey, i set the path so that the book-block should show up here, but it does not, why?) we should really not provide extra logic in the block hook, but should rather use default settings in block admin (the book could fill the bookblock sql cells with custom paths, for example) 3) we should avoid extra UIs. We already have far too much, and far too much different ones. Please rather improve the block admin, than add new separate interfaces. 4) why do book blocks need al these expeptions in the first place? If they are so exeptional, we could consider not using blocks, but something else, like in-line book layout (pages with the index etc) 5) why did you not choose for a general, standard, block gerneation API? that way modules, such as taxonomy, image gallery, weblinks, article, etc can reuse it and introduce block gernation. All that sayd, i like the idea of this functionality, but i fear for a great useability downfall if we start introducing all sorts of exeptions for all sorts of modules. Because now chances are very big that taxonomy, image gallery etc will need to introduce other UIs, other code, new methods and new documentation, if they too want some sort of better block handling. so a -1 from me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 14:12 : Bèr Kessels ^^--- That was me (bèr kessels) forgot to log in..... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 14:34 : nysus I'm not going to pretend I can argue if my patch does or does not fit well into Drupal's larger architecture. My motivation for writing it is that I had an immediate need to create an easy way to make it easy for users to create menus. I'll let others decide whether or not the patch has merit from the big picture perspective. But if it doesn't, why not just use it for its immediate benefits and then throw it away when something better comes along? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 15:01 : Dries My summary is this: +1 on the functionality, -1 on the implementation. The code itself is good, but the usability/integration is not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 15:13 : nysus When you say "usability" is that from the user's perspective or the code maintainers? I'm guessing it's the latter but I'm unsure. What about the idea of using the patch until a more permanent solution comes along? Yes, it's much better to live in a home with indoor plumbing but why not use the outhouse while you wait for a toilet to get installed? Or are there other considerations I'm overlooking that would make this a bad idea? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 15:20 : Goba nysus it is just generally against the Drupal philosophy to add improperly implemented functionality until something better comes along. There even used to be ocassions in Drupal releases, when some functionality was removed (not fixed) for a release, because its implementation was not adequate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 15:55 : Dries Usability for the user. The extra setting on the block configuration page is both confusing and awkward. I don't understand why things must be configured/enabled that way (see my and Ber's previous comments on this issue). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 16:03 : nysus Well, just for the record, I reversed that functionality per your suggestion and uploaded the patch. The indiviudal book blocks now appear automatically. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 15:56 : Bèr Kessels Hi, I am sure you can make not only simpler, but better usefull for admins and users. All you need to do is use the menus for this. i.e. make a menu entry for each book page. For each book make a menu on level 0, without a parent. that way they become a seoprate menu, each with an own block. it saves code, makes things more consistent, and most important, uses drupal functionality where it should. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 16:50 : nysus Ber, Are you suggesting that for every single book page that a menu item be created? That's really not practical. That was my main motivation for writing this patch: to make it easy to put links, not necessarily related to one another, into a block. Any more pages than 10 and the sheer tedium of the job would prevent anyone from ever doing that. The menu.module is great, but adding new menu items is far from quick and painless. I just added about 10 to my menu for different taxonomies on my site and it wasn't fun. Plus, if you do as you suggest, there is also the problem of the book showing up twice. It will be generated by the menu and then it will be generated again by the book module which is programmed to design a block. You'd have to put some logic in the book.module _block hook to try to anticipate if a user has enabled a book in the menu. That wouldn't be pretty code. I'm all for putting automatic generation of book navigation blocks as part of the menu module. It does make more sense to have it there. But it forces me to ask the question: "Then why do we currently have code in the book module that generates a menu? Shouldn't that belong in the menu.module, too?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 00:31 : killes(a)www.drop.org I think what Ber is trying to say is that you can write a contrib module that monitors the changes to the book table and creates menu items automatically. nodeapi is your friend. I would also prefer this solution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 18:39 : Anonymous "Then why do we currently have code in the book module that generates a menu? Shouldn't that belong in the menu.module, too?" Because it's old code. It would be nice if book.module generated this block using its _menu hook, so that the admin would have a few options in terms of configuration. Plus, if you do as you suggest, there is also the problem of the book showing up twice. It will be generated by the menu and then it will be generated again by the book module which is programmed to design a block. No. The old code which manually builds a block in book.module would be removed. Book blocks would only be generated by the menu. This would also have the added benefit of allow the administrator to easily place a book in an appropriate spot in the menu tree, while still allowing the possibility of displaying it in a separate block. Because of menu caching, I don't expect a large performance hit for creating the menu items. That was my main motivation for writing this patch: to make it easy to put links, not necessarily related to one another, into a block. It sounds like instead of (mis)using book.module, your time would be better spent in a usability improvement to menu.module so it's easier to do this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 16, 2004 - 08:55 : nysus Thanks for the feedback and input. I appreciate it. However, I would also appreciate if you took more care to avoid the condescending tone in your post: It sounds like instead of (mis)using book.module, your time would be better spent in a usability improvement to menu.module so it's easier to do this. It's really quite unnecessary and off-putting. Though it won't stop me from contributing to Drupal in the future, I'm sure others would be really turned off by such a patronizing comment and it could dissuade them. I'd like the Drupal community to be a welcoming and friendly place that will inspire people to contribute, not discourage them. Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 16, 2004 - 12:07 : Bèr Kessels nyesus, Please do not start /that/ discussion here. :) Drupal community is known fo being direct, maybe because of the big number of western-Europeans attending, maybe because of other reasons. No-one commented that you are wasting your time. But the commentor was telling you somthing likethis: "If you would follow the previous sugeestions, your added feature would be much better appreciated, and will probably work much better for you too". He/she was by no means telling you to stop your silly coding, or anything in that line. He/She only wanted to show you the obvious and better direction. We often deal with issues that add some feature, and a complete new UI, because the author does not like, or cannot use the existing UIs and features. This is nogt good, because if that same author would have spend his/her time on improving that existing functionality or UI (improving is not neccesarily the same as extending!!) that code and time would benefit all much better. Thats what the commentor tried to say. And so is it here: If you dislike the way the books handle the blocks, and if you do not want to use the menu, because you do not like its UI, then do not add another UI and more features, but rather merge these, and improve the parts (in the menu) you dislike. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 16, 2004 - 12:35 : Dries We can worry about the menu integration later. Let's focus on the new option's usability/interaction design first. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 16, 2004 - 16:51 : nysus I understand what the commenter was saying and like I said, I appreciate and understand it. I'm not upset and I'm not looking for an argument, I was just being direct as well. :) As part of the Drupal community (albeit a minor player), all I'm saying is that I would like to see folks not have a tin ear to the humanity in all of us. It will help make Drupal an even stronger community and attract even more talented developers. Human interaction is part of the development process. Whether we like it or not, we must cope and deal with it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 18, 2004 - 11:54 : Dries I thought some more about this and am starting to believe that integration with the menu system should take priority. Here are common cool scenario's: I want to create a separate navigation block for the 'Drupal handbook'. I want to add a menu item called 'handbook' to the user block. That is, I want the book navigation to be part of the existing user navigation block. I want to add a menu item called 'handbook' to the top-level navigation menu. How would that work from a user's point of view? What do I have to click and where to configure this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 21, 2004 - 20:47 : andremolnar I was actually thinking about the same thing last night (must have been something in the arctic air). 2. I want to add a menu item called 'handbook' to the user block. That is, I want the book navigation to be part of the existing user navigation block. 3. I want to add a menu item called 'handbook' to the top-level navigation menu. This is already possible (to a certain extent) with the current Book.module and Menu.module - A 'Books' menu item is created in the user navigation by having the Book.module enabled. Menu.module allows you to enable/disable this menu item. Menu.module also allows you to re-name this menu item. But, this only helps if you only intend to have 1 book (or else the name 'Handbook' is misleading if the user finds more than 1 book listed). - so this isn't good enough (or is it). 1. I want to create a separate navigation block for the 'Drupal handbook'. This is what I was trying to figure out. Not just this, but a different way to do what Nysus was attempting. i.e. create a menu block for each and every book that is created. There is a way to write code that would (re)build a 'custom menu' on every add/edit/update to a book page - or book outline update. Custom menu's automatically have a block created for them. But, this I think would be a misleading use of the 'custom' menu - as the menu would not be custom if they are a part of core. So, I would think that two new constants could be added to the menu.inc file - MENU_BOOK_MENU - and MENU_BOOK_ITEM - each would behave as custom menu's, but would be reserved for books. These menu types should NOT show up in the Menu.module administration - because the administration of the book_menu items would be done by administering the book itself (adding an item, removing an item, moving an item up/down in the hierarchy, assigning parents etc.). However, the blocks that the book_menus would create would show up in the block administration (so users could enable/disable each block - and decide where on the site they show up). The existing book block logic would be removed. So the logic would be: If a creates a book in the book administration page - the Book.module automatically creates a new MENU_BOOK_MENU Any time a user adds to or updates or delets a book page - the entire book menu is deleted and recreated based on the hierarchy defined by the book itself. The blocks for each book would show up in block administration. Any thoughts - I know that this doesn't exactly address points 1 and 2 - but it could act as a first step. Is this approach a bad idea? It would add special conditions for the proposed book menu's - but books would be a special case. Even if people don't like this solution, maybe it will give someone a better idea. I'd love to hear them. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 22, 2004 - 00:55 : Boris Mann +1 to this andre I had promised to put down my thoughts on this matter, as it relates to 1) primary and secondary links and how they are managed and 2) auto-generation of primary/secondary navigation based on book outlines So, for 1), we currently have functional-but-not-very-usable plain textfields to manage primary and secondary links. I would like to see menu.module used to control all navigation links, whether it is the navigation block or primary/secondary links. What is needed: a) default system menus labelled "primary" and "secondary" which would store; this is where modules could insert navigation b) support for full URLs (e.g. http://myexternaldomain.com) instead of just path 2) if we got 1 working, and andre does his book menus, this could get taken care of automatically. Basically, for brochureware/business/etc. sites that have static content, you could have a root book as one of the primary navigation links, and then the secondary links are generated automatically. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 22, 2004 - 23:02 : Dries I agree with Andre that the book module's integration with the menu system needs to be worked on. I support any effort that makes it easier to structure pages and that makes it easy to link pages/nodes from within a menu. However, I'm opposed to putting book module specific names in the menu system (eg. MENU_BOOK_MENU and MENU_BOOK_ITEM). I can imagine a handful of modules that want to maintain a menu tree (or part thereof) so I'm in favor of generic names. I'd have to read up on the menu system code, but last time I checked there was a MENU_MODIFIABLE_BY_ADMIN flag. You could choose not to set this flag for the menu items generated by the book module. Maybe it's already possible to implement to implement Andre's suggestion without having to modify/extend the menu system. Are you exploring this path? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 24, 2004 - 12:01 : andremolnar I've had a few spare hours to work on this. I've started to cobble together a solution - but in doing so I discovered a bug in the menu module (for which I will submit a seperate issue - if one doesn't already exist). The principal I suggested works. I added some code to the book module that creates custom menu's (MENU_CUSTOM_MENU with MENU_CUSTOM_ITEMs) for each Book that exists in a site. This is just as a proof of concept - I chose this menu type to start with because they automatically have a block created for them in admin/block (which is ultimatly the functionality we want). I ran a test and the menus are created as expected - the blocks are also created. But when I tested the menu blocks by enabling them I ran into a problem. It seems as though the menu system does not expand/explode sub menu items if the node type is book. I'm not sure why this is, and I haven't traced the source code yet - I thought I would ask if anyone has intimate knowledge of the menu system if they can point me in the right direction. No patch attached because until that problem is fixed this proposed change won't fly :( andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 24, 2004 - 13:11 : Dries Just a wild guess: maybe it doesn't work because the book module's URI scheme is not hierarchical? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 7, 2005 - 12:45 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_module_1.patch (5.1 KB) I finally took some time out to do some work on this. As mentioned in a post to dev the problem I was having with menus not expanding/contracting properly was some crud in my database. Once that was cleared up my changes worked fine. I am attaching a patch for comments and for the brave willing to give it a test drive. History: This thread and http://drupal.org/node/15198 and http://drupal.org/node/15153 node/15198 has a patch that is required for this patch to work. What this does: Pretty straight forward. Any time a user adds/updates/deletes book or book pages (including via outline) - a function is called to create a new menu for each book. Any existing book menus are wiped out and then the new book menus are inserted - and the system menu is rebuilt to reflect the changes. The menus created consist of type MENU_MODULE_MENU and MENU_MODULE_ITEM. These menus show up in the menu/admin page so that admins can be aware of them, but the menu types are not editable via menu/admin (all changes are handled by the book module). Since the menus are in the menu table, the menu_block() hook handles the creation of the blocks for each of them. The blocks can then be administered in the usual ways via the block/admin interface. KNOWN ISSUE: (suggested solutions welcome) Since the menu table is updated on every change to books - the blocks associated with the menus are also recreated with default settings (i.e. disabled, and with no path or throttle settings) requiring a user to take an extra step and re-configure the book blocks for viewing on their site. I think this is unacceptable. For the casual user of the book module that only has a single book that doesn't change often, this would not be a big deal. But, if anyone wanted to make use of book module to handle dynamic site navigation this would create more work than it saves. Looking forward: If the block generation issue can be solved in a tidy way, this patch could allow users to use book to handle all their site navigation generation needs. Also, this patch could allow for the removal of a large chunk of code in the book module dedicated to building its own block via the block system. I left it there for now because I suppose there may be those out there that want to have book.module work the way book.module always worked (only show the book block when viewing a book page). Even so, since each book would have its own block, an admin could specify when and where the block shows via admin/block. I would appreciate feedback. If nothing else I hope this gives someone some new ideas. I'll continue to work on the block regeneration issue. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 7, 2005 - 12:47 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_module_2.patch (4.98 KB) sorry - here's a patch with prefered line breaks. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 7, 2005 - 18:47 : nysus Andre, I've been meaning to give this a throrough look when I get a chance. Hopefully this weekend. ---Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 04:02 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_module_3.patch (6.66 KB) Here is an updated patch. Same comments as followup 51 - except that the known issue has been resolved. This changes book module so that any action taken on a book, including adding new books or book pages will create a menu in the menu system for that book - and thus create blocks for those menus that can be administered in the usual ways. This is my first attempt at a major patch to core - comments are welcome I will be happy to update documentation once revisions to the code have been taken care of. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 04:53 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_module_4.patch (6.17 KB) Sorry - would be nice if I removed some debugging code - ;-) also previous patch also would have introduced a need for a change to the menu table that isn't required yet. This patch is a correct version andre -- View: http://drupal.org/node/14120 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/14120

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[drupal-devel] cvs log messages
by no-reply＠zind.net 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

File: /modules/album/album.module 1.2 /modules/og/og.module 1.28 Date: January 20, 2005 - 19:14 User: weitzman fix buggy links and many otherl improvements. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/devel/generate/README 1.3 /modules/devel/README 1.6 Date: January 20, 2005 - 15:53 User: ber ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /translations/da/aggregator-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/archive-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/block-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/blog-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/blogapi-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/book-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/comment-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/common-inc.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/drupal-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/file-inc.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/filter-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/forum-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/general.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/languages.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/locale-inc.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/locale-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/menu-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/node-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/path-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/ping-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/poll-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/profile-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/queue-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/README 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/search-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/statistics-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/story-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/system-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/taxonomy-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/throttle-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/upload-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/user-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /translations/da/watchdog-module.po 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 20, 2005 - 14:50 User: wulff Initial release ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/massmailer/engines/phplist/bin/phplist 1.1.2.2 DRUPAL-4-5 /modules/massmailer/engines/phplist/phplist.module 1.1.2.3 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 20, 2005 - 14:50 User: crunchywelch fix php shell script environment bug that causes recursive page requests when processing the message queue ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/massmailer/engines/phplist/bin/phplist 1.2 /modules/massmailer/engines/phplist/phplist.module 1.3 Date: January 20, 2005 - 14:47 User: crunchywelch fix php shell script environment bug that causes recursive page requests when processing the message queue ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/filestore2/filestore2.module 1.26 Date: January 20, 2005 - 12:17 User: gordon - fixed up some validation problems and a couple of typo's ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/fscache/fscache.module 1.12 Date: January 20, 2005 - 12:16 User: gordon - fix a bug the was causing problems in pgsql. - plus other minor bugs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/bloggerauth/bloggerauth.module 1.1 /modules/bloggerauth/INSTALL.txt 1.1 /modules/bloggerauth/README.txt 1.1 Date: January 20, 2005 - 08:21 User: themike Initial import of untested code. Docs are tested tho ;-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/banner/banner.module 1.41.2.3 DRUPAL-4-5 /modules/banner/CHANGELOG 1.21.2.4 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 20, 2005 - 03:56 User: jeremy sync with head, fixing issue #15873 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/banner/banner.module 1.45 /modules/banner/CHANGELOG 1.25 Date: January 20, 2005 - 03:55 User: jeremy - banner.module o fix issue #15873: fix link to user account, remove []'s around options, ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/legal/legal.module 1.4 Date: January 20, 2005 - 03:40 User: killes admin edit bugfix ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/legal/legal.module 1.3 Date: January 20, 2005 - 02:17 User: killes Upgrade to 4.5 , patch by Mark Ryan and myself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/over_text/over_text.module 1.10.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 20, 2005 - 01:59 User: nedjo Fix to issue #14162 as reported by drupal.org user skorch. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /sandbox/walkah/image/bu/bu.module NONE /sandbox/walkah/image/bu/readme.txt NONE Date: January 20, 2005 - 01:51 User: weitzman deprecated in favor of album.module ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/jsdomenu/jsdomenu.module 1.13.2.2 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 20, 2005 - 01:44 User: nedjo Applied fix to bug report #11418 as supplied by drupal.org user joel_guesclin. Converted line endings to unix. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /translations/it/locale-module.po 1.10 Date: January 20, 2005 - 00:15 User: michelef Drupal 4.5.2 translation; complete. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /translations/it/search-module.po 1.6 Date: January 20, 2005 - 00:12 User: michelef Drupal 4.5.2 translation; ongoing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /translations/it/menu-module.po 1.6 Date: January 20, 2005 - 00:12 User: michelef Drupal 4.5.2 translation; complete. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /translations/it/book-module.po 1.8 Date: January 20, 2005 - 00:11 User: michelef Drupal 4.5.2 translation; complete. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /translations/it/blog-module.po 1.8 Date: January 20, 2005 - 00:11 User: michelef Drupal 4.5.2 translation; complete. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /translations/it/block-module.po 1.8 Date: January 20, 2005 - 00:09 User: michelef Drupal 4.5.2 translation; complete. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /translations/it/aggregator-module.po 1.10 Date: January 20, 2005 - 00:09 User: michelef Drupal 4.5.2 translation; complete. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/copyright/copyright.mysql 1.2 Date: January 19, 2005 - 23:42 User: veridicus Removed column COMMENTs because they're causing problems for MySQL 3.23 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/copyright/copyright.mysql 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 19, 2005 - 23:23 User: veridicus Removed column COMMENTs because it appears to be breaking in MySQL 3.23 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/album/album.module 1.1 /modules/album/readme.txt 1.1 Date: January 19, 2005 - 22:51 User: weitzman Personal image galleries. Users may create as many galleries as they wish ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/og/og.module 1.1.2.23 DRUPAL-4-5 /modules/og/readme.txt 1.1.2.9 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 19, 2005 - 22:42 User: weitzman reworked image galleries. the bulk upload (bu.module) is no longer needed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/og/og.module 1.27 /modules/og/readme.txt 1.10 Date: January 19, 2005 - 22:42 User: weitzman reworked image galleries. the bulk upload (bu.module) is no longer needed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/book.module 1.280 Date: January 19, 2005 - 22:13 User: dries - Patch #15843 by Ber: in book-pages node forms we use a delta of fifteen (-15 to +15) but in the book-outline admin we dont dewfine this, resulting in a default delta of ten. This should be consistent and thus both 15. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/massmailer/po/massmailer-module.pot 1.1.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 19, 2005 - 22:08 User: goba adding translation template as gsuveg asked for it ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /includes/menu.inc 1.74 Date: January 19, 2005 - 21:57 User: dries - Patch #9477 by JonBob: improved handling of user-specified paths. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/ldap_addressbook/README.txt 1.1 Date: January 19, 2005 - 21:11 User: olen First commit. Read README.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/ldap_addressbook/ldap_addressbook.module 1.1 Date: January 19, 2005 - 21:10 User: olen First commit to CVS, read README.txt and the comments in the code. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/contact_dir/contact_dir.module 1.2 /modules/contact_dir/fields.inc 1.2 Date: January 19, 2005 - 20:37 User: latpro Applyed coding conventions ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/taxonomy.module 1.152.2.6 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 19, 2005 - 20:35 User: dries - Patch #15690 by Goba: the vocabulary node types checks in taxonomy.module are very vulnerable to having node types names as prefixes of other node type names %%%s%% as it is there with %%blog%% will match a lot more, then just this simple node type. Since the node types are stored in a comma separated list, the solution is to search for 'blog' or '%%,blog,%%' or 'blog,%%' or '%%,blog', that is matching only for that node type, or matching that node type in a list, or at the beginning of a list, or at the end of a list. It does not look elegant, but this is the solution for the format used. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/livejournal/INSTALL.txt 1.1 /modules/livejournal/livejournal.module 1.1 /modules/livejournal/README.txt 1.1 Date: January 19, 2005 - 19:46 User: themike Created the livejournal auth module. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/filter.module 1.51 Date: January 19, 2005 - 19:30 User: dries - Refinements by Walkah, based on suggestions of Steven and myself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/spam/CHANGELOG 1.32 /modules/spam/spam.module 1.34 /modules/spam/spam.pgsql 1.1 Date: January 19, 2005 - 19:27 User: jeremy - spam.module o converted " to ' within db_queries containing strings to properly support postgresql (see http://drupal.org/node/15684) - spam.pgsql o postgresql script provided thanks to Zed Pobre (issue #15684) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/taxonomy_menu/CHANGELOG 1.7.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 /modules/taxonomy_menu/taxonomy_menu.module 1.11.2.1 DRUPAL-4-5 Date: January 19, 2005 - 19:25 User: JonBob Correcting "no posts in category" behavior. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- File: /modules/taxonomy_menu/CHANGELOG 1.8 /modules/taxonomy_menu/taxonomy_menu.module 1.13 Date: January 19, 2005 - 19:24 User: JonBob Correcting "no posts in category" behavior. ----------------------------------------------------------------------

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[drupal-devel] Dealing with spam (was rel=nofollow)
by Chris Messina 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

It appears that WordPress has a pretty killer spam killer plugin (ha!) that we might take some hints (code?) from... Frankly, I think that us open source CMS/blog apps should put our heads together and root this problem out collectively. Why duplicate effort when we all need the same tools? >From http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/ *Spam Karma* Layman's Explanation Spam Karma works by running every new comment through a battery of filters and checks. Each of which increase or decrease the comment's 'Karma' value. Depending on the final score, the comment is either: * Approved * Discarded silently as spam (no email is sent to you, unless you specifically require it, but a digest is sent to you every X spams deleted). * Placed in Moderation mode. With the possibility for the commenter to auto-moderate his own comment by proving he's not a spammer (by filling a Captcha or checking a confirmation email). This whole process insures (by order of priority): * No deleted false positive (bad bad bad). * Extremely few moderated false positives (annoying): uses Captcha and email auto-moderation to keep these at a minimum. * No published spam. * very little spam held in moderation (must be destroyed directly: really annoying to have to moderate it). Further more, Spam Karma works in an intelligent way to automatically update its filtering database and grow stronger with each spam it catches… In short: blocks spam with no unnecessary annoyance, for you or your visitors. The way it should be. The Detailed Explanation For our more tech oriented friends, here are a few more insights on the rather complex process used by Spam Karma to decide what's spam and what's not. Each of the following filter is given a weight varying on many factors, ranking from user-controlled values (e.g.: after how many days is a post "old"?) to the credibility that can be given to a test (e.g.: a missing header is less important than a blacklisted IP). Mostly, Spam Karma looks at the following things: * If the poster is logged in the current blog, and what his user level is (e.g. automatically approve Admin posts). * Presence of HTML entities (e.g. {, ʚ etc). * Presence of a HTTP_VIA header. * Proper use of the posting form (hash value must be present). * Time taken to fill the comment (e.g.: if it's less than a few seconds, most likely spam). * Posting granularity. First time posters posting many comments at once vs. old-timers (with comments previously approved by the admin). * Previous diagnostic from WP's built in comment check (set on the 'Discussion' panel). * IP and regex match for URLs contained inside the comment (small weight only for non-URL text matching a URL regex). * Realtime Blacklist (RBL) Server check for IP and URLs. * Comment's age (e.g. penalize comments on very old post). In addition to these filters, Spam Karma uses different treatments and backup checks to insure it becomes better at stopping further spam and that it never deletes mistakenly a legit comment: * Ambiguous comments (that can neither be deleted or approved) are given a second check: commenter is asked to solve a Captcha or use the email auto-moderation (an email containing a hash to unlock the comment is sent to the commenter's email address). If confirmed, the comment's Karma is bumped up and the comment is either published or held for further review, if not confirmed within a certain period, its Karma is lowered and it is either deleted or kept into moderation (if it was sufficiently high to begin with). * When a comment is struck as spam, its IP and URL(s) are harvested and submitted to the Admin for inclusion in the blacklist. In the meantime, they are used as "auto-added" values, with a lesser weight than permanent blacklist entries. * When destroying a spam comment, it checks for recently posted comments that match similar values and retroactively moderate them (e.g.: a spammer could manage to slip X numbers of spams onto a blog, but upon reaching a certain suspicious threshold, all the comments would get retroactively moderated, then deleted). * Spam Karma uses a central DB to retrieve IP and URL updates. By default, it will query the DB automatically every 2 days (can be disabled). Central DB can be configured. Each install of Spam Karma can work as a sort of P2P relay in the update process (both fetching updates and publishing its own updated list for others to grab).

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[drupal-devel] [bug] files folder created with incorrect permissions
by Morbus Iff 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: file system Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: Morbus Iff Reported by: Anonymous Updated by: Morbus Iff Status: patch In chatting about this with #drupal, I'm thinking that something more than just "sane defaults" needs to be enabled. The patch I just submitted still has one "fatal" flaw: it doesn't allow write permissions for the FTP user. This was ultimately deliberate (more chance of accepting the patch with less dangerous permission, and the assumption that a Drupal-controlled upload also offered a Drupal-controlled deletion), but still isn't ideal. Unfortunately, with SuEXEC servers and various configurations, there is no SAFE default: on one hand you're giving 666 to everyone because you have to (wwwrun:nogroup) and on the other, 666 is too much (if you're running under SuEXEC, then gangrene:users/640 is right, and 666 is wrong). I think the only way this will be truly solved is with user intervention, which means umask settings for file/directory in the "Files" section of admin/setting. This is also the same solution that Movable Type uses, which allows two special settings in its mt.cfg: # When creating files and directories, Movable Type uses umask settings to # control the permissions set on the files. The default settings for file # creation (HTMLUmask, DBUmask, and UploadUmask) are 0111; for directory # creation (DirUmask), the default is 0000. You should not change these # settings unless you are running MT under cgiwrap or suexec, or some other # scenario where the MT application runs as you; in addition, you should not # change these settings unless you know what they mean, and what they do. # # DBUmask 0022 # HTMLUmask 0022 # UploadUmask 0022 # DirUmask 0022 # # In addition to controlling permissions via umask settings, you can also # use the HTMLPerms and UploadPerms settings to control the default # permissions for files created by the system (either as output files or # uploaded files). The only real use of this is to turn on the executable bit # of files created by the system--for example, if MT is generating PHP files # that need to have the executable bit turned on, you could set HTMLPerms # to 0777. The default is 0666. You should not change these settings unless # you know what they mean, and what they do. # # HTMLPerms 0777 # UploadPerms 0777 For our needs, we'd really only need a DirectoryUmask and a FileUmask option. Is this an amicable solution to anyone? If I get you a patch, will this be implemented in Drupal 4.6? Morbus Iff Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 8, 2004 - 13:04 : Anonymous Hi,- > [rreading@tribal html]$ ls -l www/files > total 12 > drwxr----- 2 nobody nobody 4096 Sep 8 12:22 pictures > drwxrwxrwx 2 rreading users 4096 Sep 8 12:33 tmp > drwxr----- 3 nobody nobody 4096 Sep 8 12:33 upload the problem is very strange, and might even be a nasty drupal bug: As of the CVS version we decided to let drupal generate the folders itself, so that Joe User needs not to use ssh or ftp to make /configure various folders. So these were generated by PHP and thus have the wrong permission. The user PHP is a differnet user in this case, and something that PHP created is inacessible to us. I am aware that this is sierverspecific, but its annoying enought for me (and probably others) not to ignore. Regards, Ber ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 18, 2004 - 21:46 : dtan Any update on this. . ?? I recently installed the 4.5 Head and the problem still exists. Recommendations on how to actually change the permission on the folder? dtan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 28, 2004 - 10:53 : killes(a)www.drop.org The apache user did create this directories. So it is natural that they have the apache user "nobody" as owner. Drupal should be able to handle this just file. Can we close this report? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 28, 2004 - 10:58 : Bèr Kessels No, please do not close. Its a bug IMO. Because a lot of (v)hosts do not put apache in the same group as the FTP user. It will work, file uplaods etc will work for Drupal, but you, as user, cannot access the files anymore by FTP. But even worse, you cannot remove your drupal installation, without intervention of root (or the server maintainer). I had two "empty" domains with 30 MB of files taking up space for 3 months. Another domain will not let me mirror (backup) anything because of this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 29, 2004 - 22:55 : svemir If PHP/apache can create these folders, it should be able to remove them as well. Perhaps an option somewhere to remove folders created by Drupal? Maybe a button next to the place in administration where the folder is specified. And also maybe the creation of the folders should be optional in the first place... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 20:52 : Morbus Iff This just bit me today too. Installed the banner.module, and ensured that my files/ directory was 777, with the owner as gangrene:user. Uploaded a new banner, and for various reasons, it didn't work. As I started to investigate, I found that the files/banner directory, which was "successfully" created (success determined by "I can access files uploaded in that folder via a URL) was not visible to my FTP server (at this point, proFTPd, though I've not yet tested on vsftpd). One of ProFTPds feature is to hide folders that do not have the executable bit set. The default permissions of Drupal is not to set these, per file_check_directory in includes/file.inc. So, my newly Drupal-created files/banners folder was given the permissions of (where wwwrun and nogroup are the Apache user/group). drwxrw---- 2 wwwrun nogroup 88 Jan 19 20:03 banners Since there's no execute for everyone, and since the "gangrene" user is not part of "nogroup", I was not able to see, access, or modify the newly created folder. I had to manually issue chmod('files/banners', 0761) to even look at the blasted thing. My recommendation is to change the file_check_directory chmod to 0771, which should create drwxrwx--x permissions. The extra execute permission on the "nogroup" is harmless, and allows ProFTPd to display it (in this case to "nogroup", but also perhaps to the "users" group on other systems), and the execute permission for everyone is absolutely required for me to see it in under ProFTPD. These permissions are giving any extra (or damaging) permissions to anyone, but merely following the expectations of various FTP servers concerning "what a directory is". There's a similar bug related to uploaded files, but I've not yet found the code for that one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 20:55 : Morbus Iff Grrrr... "these permissions are NOT giving any extra (or damaging) permissions". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 21:12 : Morbus Iff To revise my previous statement, it would be best to use perms 0765, which adds "read" access to the "everyone" group. The correction is simple: if we want to /see/ the folder in FTP, then we also want to see /inside/ the folder via FTP. Again, I don't believe this change really gives extra dangerous permissions to anyone, merely grants the same permission to an authenticated FTP user (if a file upload can be seen on the web by people who know its there, then the same access should be applied to FTP users with the right knowledge [ie., un/pw]). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 21:29 : Morbus Iff Alrighty, hunted down the file (not directory) related problem. Unlike directories, which require us to enter a mode, file uploads are not specified, thus they take on the default umask of the web server's user (in my case, wwwgroup:nogroup, 640). This further causes problems with FTP viewing because "everyone" has no permission (in my case, since I'm a part of the "users" group, I can not view, modify, delete, mirror, etc. files that have been uploaded through Drupal). This has been tracked down to file_copy() (includes/file.inc) and the following lines, which copy the uploaded file from the temp directory ($source) to the final destination ($dest). if (!@copy($source, $dest)) { drupal_set_message(t('File copy failed.'), 'error'); return 0; } My proposal is to add an explicit chmod after the copy, granting read permission to "everyone", something to the effect of the following, which will give read and write to the webserver process, read to the webserver group, and read to everyone (ie., little old me, not of the webserver group). if (!@copy($source, $dest)) { drupal_set_message(t('File copy failed.'), 'error'); return 0; } chmod($dest, 0644). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 19, 2005 - 21:40 : Morbus Iff Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/fileperm.patch (606 bytes) Attached is a patch for Drupal 4.5.1 that implements these changes (directory is set for 764, not 765 - the mode in my previous comment was [another] error). Last time I contributed a patch, I created a bug so please review extra carefully. -- View: http://drupal.org/node/10658 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/10658

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Re: [drupal-devel] Dealing with spam (was rel=nofollow)
by mike＠fuckingbrit.com 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

>First of all it should be shared over a closed XML feed. >We can use drupalIds and a special role to secure the ahraing (we dont want >spammers to learn from our tokens). Why closed? As previously mentioned, I'm in the process of migrating from geeklog. Geeklog's solution is the SpamX plugin. I've used this from my HTTP_REFERER stats plugin to filter HTTP_REFERER spam, and it's used by the comments system to filter spam plugins. Their approach is to use the Moveable Type system: http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/ Which is an open text file listing blacklisted regexps. SpamX also allows you to maintain your own individual blacklist, which is shared out to an open xml file for other geeklog sites/MT to harvest. Using a closed system working around drupal ids means you close the loop to other systems. Why not make your block list public to all, import and merge from other existing blacklists (including moveabletype, other drupal personal lists etc) and allow people to harvest your entire merged list. Keep the list big, public and contributed back to all sources. What benefit to spammers get from seeing the list? They know their site is blacklisted and buy a new domain? It'll soon be blacklisted again, plus baysean (sp) filtering in Drupal may keep the new one off anyway. Cheers, Mike -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .

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[drupal-devel] Import script framework
by Tim Altman 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:28:55 -0000, Michael Jervis <mike(a)fuckingbrit.com> wrote: > Tim: > >> You can find my current work in my sandbox. > > Hmm, well, you may be known enough in drupal for others to find your sand > box, but I'm drawing a blank here. No taltman, tim or altman or other > obviously named sandbox sub-dir. Sorry, it's at http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/junyor/import/. >> If at all possible, we should use the same framework for importation >> scripts, so it's easy to make a new importer plug-in. > > If you have a framework, I'd like to take a look, so if you could point > me > the right way. Constructive criticism is welcome. -- Tim Altman

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[drupal-devel] [feature] Improve functionality of block generation for book module
by andremolnar 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: book.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: nysus Reported by: nysus Updated by: andremolnar Status: patch Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_module_4.patch (6.17 KB) Sorry - would be nice if I removed some debugging code - ;-) also previous patch also would have introduced a need for a change to the menu table that isn't required yet. This patch is a correct version andre andremolnar Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 06:12 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_19.patch (4.85 KB) Attached is a patch for the book module that does the following: 1) Allows book blocks to appear on any page at any time, not just when a node from the book is being viewed. 2) Allows multiple book blocks to appear on the same page. This functionality is achieved by the automatic creation of individual blocks for each book when the book is created. Simply enable the book's block to enjoy the benefits of 1 & 2 above. If the blocks are not enabled, the blocks will appear only when a node from that block is being viewed (the same way it works now). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 12:35 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_19_1.patch (4.84 KB) +1 This is great. A good many people have asked for something like this, and I think its a nice solution. But in the end this isn't up to me. One minor error in the patch... + $result = db_query('SELECT n.title, b.block, b.nid FROM {book} b INNER JOIN {node} n on n.nid = b.nid WHERE b.parent = 0'); b.block is not a valid field in this query. this updated patch removes reference to it. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 13:54 : nysus Glad you like it and thanks for fixing that up. It was left over from an older version of my patch. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 13:54 : andremolnar Steve, If I apply this patch, and I attempt to configure one of the newly created blocks. I noticed that for some reason the block.module is returning "true" at line 249 (of the block module)- and is creating a form for module-specific configuration. But all that shows up on the screen is the word "array". Can you trace this back to see why - and maybe update the patch. I can continue to test your changes - anything to help this patch make it into core. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 15:29 : nysus Hmmm...probably because I tested my patch on my version of Drupal, version 4.5.1. I'm having no problems. Are you using a cvs version of Drupal to test. If so, I'll set up cvs on my site and track this down. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 18:53 : drumm See http://drupal.org/node/12347 for information on how the block system has been updated. When I saw that the elseif ($op == 'view') was taken out I knew immedaitely that there was something weird about this patch. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 18:58 : nysus OK, thanks for the tip. Sorry for the confusion. Still kind of new to making open source contributions and it's easy for me to overlook some obvious stuff like this. I'll fix this up when I get a chance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 19:06 : Dries Please do, because this being a new feature, it has no chance getting committed to the DRUPAL-4-5 branch. The DRUPAL-4-5 branch is in bugfix-mode. New features go into CVS HEAD. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 9, 2004 - 22:32 : Dries There is quite a bit of duplicated code in the patch. Maybe it can be simplified (using a function)? Either way, it is a little weird. I haven't tried the path, and I'm not sure I understood the description. It's somewhat vague. Is the book module exporting multiple blocks that are nearly identical, yet have different display behavior? If so, why not add a simple block configuration setting to the original book block? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 02:51 : nysus Dries, Yes, there is some code that can be factored out and some general cleaning up that can be done. It was a little tricky to write so I left it kind of ragged around the edges until I'm sure there are no bugs. It has worked very well on 4.5.1 but I obviously need to update it to work with cvs. I'll be on that soon. As far as what it does: 1) For every new book that a user creates, a new block is associated with it. So if you create "Book A", "Book B", "Book C", you will get three new blocks visible on the block administration page called "Book A", "Book B", "Book C". The original "Book Navigation" block is still there, too. The functionality of the "Book Navigation" block is not affected at all by this patch. 2) If Book A's block is enabled, the block containing its menu will appear not only when a node within Book A is viewed, but at all times (unless the user suppresses it on certain pages with the "path" feature). When any node is that is NOT in Book A is viewed, Book A's menu still appears but it is fully collapsed. When a node that DOES belong to Book A is viewed, Book A's Book menu expands accordingly. 3) The user can also enable Book B & C's block, and have their menus appear in a block at all times as well. 4) If none of the book's blocks are enabled by the user, the module will behave just as it did without the patch. That is, when the "Book Navigation" block is enabled, the only time any book menu will appear is when a book node is being viewed. 5) It's important to note (and this was the tricky part to write) that if both the "Book Navigation" block is enabled and "Book A" is enabled, they will play nice with each other and not do nasty things like create the same book menu twice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 05:51 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_20.patch (5.37 KB) Andre, Attached is a new patch that will resolve the problem of the block-specific stuff showing on the block configuration form. Let me know if you spot any other bugs. If it looks good to you, I'll go to work making the code look leaner and prettier. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 07:26 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_21.patch (4 KB) Dries, Andre: Here is a new and improved streamlined version of the patch. Have a look if you get a chance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 08:11 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_22.patch (4.15 KB) Found a bug in the last version that would cause the block to jump to a different location. I think this should do it. Everything appear to work well (famous last words). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 14:49 : andremolnar Steve: bugs appear to be gone, and I didn't run across any other errors. This is functioning exactly as described. everyone: I personally would encourage support for this functionality. Book is a powerful navigation building tool in a site, not only with its ability to move next and back through a hierarchy of pages - but also its ability to build the appropriate navigation block without further user intervention (unlike the admin features in the menu module or taxonomy). The most frequently cited complaint about the book module is its inflexibility when it comes to when and where the block shows up. I also frequently hear requests for the ability to show multiple book blocks at the same time. Up until now the best alternatives suggested required users to do a hack (e.g. build a custom block that calls such and such a hook). Most abandon their request at that point because its over their heads. With this patch all those requests are covered and more. Now all books can automatically have their own block and admins can easily decide when and where each of those individual blocks show up (left right, up down) and coupled with the new configuration features of the block module - its very easy for admins to decide on which individual pages a block will show up. I would be interested what other have to say about this feature. My only reservation (which is minor compared to the benefits of the functionality offered) is that there is no way to turn this functionality off. i.e. The default behaviour is to build individual blocks for each book. If there could be a way to toggle this feature on and off somewhere - it would be perfect. Still, AS IS - this is a major improvement and offers great flexibility to admins and site creators. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 15:04 : Anonymous Andre, Thanks for the feedback on the usefulness of this module. Glad I could pitch in and help. I agree about the inability to turn the feature on/off and I was thinking about that myself. I think it could easily be accomplished by creating a checkbox in the "book navigation" block individual configuration's settings. Call it "Enable individual book blocks." When enabled, the individual book blocks will appear on the block administration menu. One question: Where would the state of this checkbox get saved? Has Drupal moved away from serializing data in the data base? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 18:36 : Dries I'm afraid that 'Enable individual book blocks.' is not descriptive/clear at all. Are you suggesting a setting to toggle between 'show block on all pages' and 'show block on book pages only'? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 19:45 : nysus Dries, No. Andre and I suggest a setting within the "Book Navigation" cofiguration page, that would toggle whether or not individual books appear on the list of all blocks on the block administration page. Hence the name 'Enable individual book navigation blocks.' The help text for this checkbox might read something like: "By default, a book's navigation block is visible only when a page from that book is being viewed. Check this box if you want more control over where and when an book's navigation block is visible. You will then be able to control the book's navigation block location and visibility settings on the "admin/block" page." Hope this makes it pretty clear. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 10, 2004 - 20:08 : Dries I understand what you are trying to do, but not how you are trying to do it, or how the setting is supposed to work. I guess I'll have to try it when a new patch lands. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 09:52 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_23.patch (5.02 KB) Alright, fellas, I'm proud to unveil my crowning achievement in the open source development world (no big deal to most of you guys but pretty good for a hack like me). Thanks for all the input so far. It's been helpful. I've streamlined the heck out of it per Dries suggestion and I've created an option to turn this functionality on an off per Andre's suggestion. Does this look good to you guys? Anything else I have to fix or improve? Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 13:02 : Dries I tried the patch. It works great but to me, the 'Give books their own block' settings seems to be redundant. Why not export the current book navigation block, along with an additional block for each book? Looks a lot simpler to me. I think I spotted a bug: orphaned book pages (or possibly book pages that are unpublished) appear to be getting book navigation blocks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 17:34 : nysus I'll see if I can fix the bug. Might be tricky. But I don't understand your recommendation to "export the current book navigation block, along with an additional block for each book". Can you expand on this thought? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 18:06 : nysus Dries, I am unable to duplicate the bug. I have three orphaned pages. I also tried unpublishing some pages. But as far as I can tell, the patch works as expected. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 19:00 : Dries If you can't reproduce the problem, chances are my node/book table is somewhat fubar. As for the configuration option. I suggest removing it and to always make these new blocks available on the /admin/block configuration screen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 19:52 : moshe weitzman I am hoping that we maintain the option to keep the behavior where the appropriate book block only shows up when its book page viewed. this is a nice, tidy arrangement. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 20:03 : nysus Yes, if you don't enable any of the individual book blocks, the a book's block (i.e. navigation menu) will only appear when a page in a book is viewed. In other words, you have the option to have the book block act like this patch isn't even installed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 20:54 : Dries I guess I'll have to try the patch again, because I don't understand why it works like this -- or at least, why it can't be made simpler. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 21:13 : nysus Can you be more specific? Why it works like what? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 21:24 : nysus Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_24.patch (4.1 KB) This patch reverses a change made in the last patch which required a user to enable individual book block before they could enable any individual book blocks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 11, 2004 - 21:41 : andremolnar As I mentioned earlier I am *fine* with either version of this patch as long as it makes it to core. But, as I said earlier, I clearly think the preference for admins would be to have the option to enable or disable this functionality. BTW - if this does make it in, I would be happy to create a Handbook page that describes the new features - something like "how to build robust site navigation using the book module". (on or after December 17th). andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 12:11 : Anonymous I am not at all happy with these features. They are incosistant, confusing and should use exising methods and UIs. May main concern is the incosistancy: it is confusing, will require extra attention with each core code change, adds extra logic to the core, and is not re-useable. so here are my questions: 1) why do we not use the menu system and apis to build and adminster the trees? Saves code, does not add extra UIs, and gives users more power. 2) why do we need that extra showing logic? a book block should not get exeptional if clauses, it should use the existing path setting methods on block admin. extra logic is confusing for administrators (hey, i set the path so that the book-block should show up here, but it does not, why?) we should really not provide extra logic in the block hook, but should rather use default settings in block admin (the book could fill the bookblock sql cells with custom paths, for example) 3) we should avoid extra UIs. We already have far too much, and far too much different ones. Please rather improve the block admin, than add new separate interfaces. 4) why do book blocks need al these expeptions in the first place? If they are so exeptional, we could consider not using blocks, but something else, like in-line book layout (pages with the index etc) 5) why did you not choose for a general, standard, block gerneation API? that way modules, such as taxonomy, image gallery, weblinks, article, etc can reuse it and introduce block gernation. All that sayd, i like the idea of this functionality, but i fear for a great useability downfall if we start introducing all sorts of exeptions for all sorts of modules. Because now chances are very big that taxonomy, image gallery etc will need to introduce other UIs, other code, new methods and new documentation, if they too want some sort of better block handling. so a -1 from me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 12:12 : Bèr Kessels ^^--- That was me (bèr kessels) forgot to log in..... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 12:34 : nysus I'm not going to pretend I can argue if my patch does or does not fit well into Drupal's larger architecture. My motivation for writing it is that I had an immediate need to create an easy way to make it easy for users to create menus. I'll let others decide whether or not the patch has merit from the big picture perspective. But if it doesn't, why not just use it for its immediate benefits and then throw it away when something better comes along? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 13:01 : Dries My summary is this: +1 on the functionality, -1 on the implementation. The code itself is good, but the usability/integration is not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 13:13 : nysus When you say "usability" is that from the user's perspective or the code maintainers? I'm guessing it's the latter but I'm unsure. What about the idea of using the patch until a more permanent solution comes along? Yes, it's much better to live in a home with indoor plumbing but why not use the outhouse while you wait for a toilet to get installed? Or are there other considerations I'm overlooking that would make this a bad idea? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 13:20 : Goba nysus it is just generally against the Drupal philosophy to add improperly implemented functionality until something better comes along. There even used to be ocassions in Drupal releases, when some functionality was removed (not fixed) for a release, because its implementation was not adequate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 13:55 : Dries Usability for the user. The extra setting on the block configuration page is both confusing and awkward. I don't understand why things must be configured/enabled that way (see my and Ber's previous comments on this issue). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2004 - 14:03 : nysus Well, just for the record, I reversed that functionality per your suggestion and uploaded the patch. The indiviudal book blocks now appear automatically. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 13:56 : Bèr Kessels Hi, I am sure you can make not only simpler, but better usefull for admins and users. All you need to do is use the menus for this. i.e. make a menu entry for each book page. For each book make a menu on level 0, without a parent. that way they become a seoprate menu, each with an own block. it saves code, makes things more consistent, and most important, uses drupal functionality where it should. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 14:50 : nysus Ber, Are you suggesting that for every single book page that a menu item be created? That's really not practical. That was my main motivation for writing this patch: to make it easy to put links, not necessarily related to one another, into a block. Any more pages than 10 and the sheer tedium of the job would prevent anyone from ever doing that. The menu.module is great, but adding new menu items is far from quick and painless. I just added about 10 to my menu for different taxonomies on my site and it wasn't fun. Plus, if you do as you suggest, there is also the problem of the book showing up twice. It will be generated by the menu and then it will be generated again by the book module which is programmed to design a block. You'd have to put some logic in the book.module _block hook to try to anticipate if a user has enabled a book in the menu. That wouldn't be pretty code. I'm all for putting automatic generation of book navigation blocks as part of the menu module. It does make more sense to have it there. But it forces me to ask the question: "Then why do we currently have code in the book module that generates a menu? Shouldn't that belong in the menu.module, too?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 13, 2004 - 22:31 : killes(a)www.drop.org I think what Ber is trying to say is that you can write a contrib module that monitors the changes to the book table and creates menu items automatically. nodeapi is your friend. I would also prefer this solution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 15, 2004 - 16:39 : Anonymous "Then why do we currently have code in the book module that generates a menu? Shouldn't that belong in the menu.module, too?" Because it's old code. It would be nice if book.module generated this block using its _menu hook, so that the admin would have a few options in terms of configuration. Plus, if you do as you suggest, there is also the problem of the book showing up twice. It will be generated by the menu and then it will be generated again by the book module which is programmed to design a block. No. The old code which manually builds a block in book.module would be removed. Book blocks would only be generated by the menu. This would also have the added benefit of allow the administrator to easily place a book in an appropriate spot in the menu tree, while still allowing the possibility of displaying it in a separate block. Because of menu caching, I don't expect a large performance hit for creating the menu items. That was my main motivation for writing this patch: to make it easy to put links, not necessarily related to one another, into a block. It sounds like instead of (mis)using book.module, your time would be better spent in a usability improvement to menu.module so it's easier to do this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 16, 2004 - 06:55 : nysus Thanks for the feedback and input. I appreciate it. However, I would also appreciate if you took more care to avoid the condescending tone in your post: It sounds like instead of (mis)using book.module, your time would be better spent in a usability improvement to menu.module so it's easier to do this. It's really quite unnecessary and off-putting. Though it won't stop me from contributing to Drupal in the future, I'm sure others would be really turned off by such a patronizing comment and it could dissuade them. I'd like the Drupal community to be a welcoming and friendly place that will inspire people to contribute, not discourage them. Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 16, 2004 - 10:07 : Bèr Kessels nyesus, Please do not start /that/ discussion here. :) Drupal community is known fo being direct, maybe because of the big number of western-Europeans attending, maybe because of other reasons. No-one commented that you are wasting your time. But the commentor was telling you somthing likethis: "If you would follow the previous sugeestions, your added feature would be much better appreciated, and will probably work much better for you too". He/she was by no means telling you to stop your silly coding, or anything in that line. He/She only wanted to show you the obvious and better direction. We often deal with issues that add some feature, and a complete new UI, because the author does not like, or cannot use the existing UIs and features. This is nogt good, because if that same author would have spend his/her time on improving that existing functionality or UI (improving is not neccesarily the same as extending!!) that code and time would benefit all much better. Thats what the commentor tried to say. And so is it here: If you dislike the way the books handle the blocks, and if you do not want to use the menu, because you do not like its UI, then do not add another UI and more features, but rather merge these, and improve the parts (in the menu) you dislike. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 16, 2004 - 10:35 : Dries We can worry about the menu integration later. Let's focus on the new option's usability/interaction design first. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 16, 2004 - 14:51 : nysus I understand what the commenter was saying and like I said, I appreciate and understand it. I'm not upset and I'm not looking for an argument, I was just being direct as well. :) As part of the Drupal community (albeit a minor player), all I'm saying is that I would like to see folks not have a tin ear to the humanity in all of us. It will help make Drupal an even stronger community and attract even more talented developers. Human interaction is part of the development process. Whether we like it or not, we must cope and deal with it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 18, 2004 - 09:54 : Dries I thought some more about this and am starting to believe that integration with the menu system should take priority. Here are common cool scenario's: I want to create a separate navigation block for the 'Drupal handbook'. I want to add a menu item called 'handbook' to the user block. That is, I want the book navigation to be part of the existing user navigation block. I want to add a menu item called 'handbook' to the top-level navigation menu. How would that work from a user's point of view? What do I have to click and where to configure this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 21, 2004 - 18:47 : andremolnar I was actually thinking about the same thing last night (must have been something in the arctic air). 2. I want to add a menu item called 'handbook' to the user block. That is, I want the book navigation to be part of the existing user navigation block. 3. I want to add a menu item called 'handbook' to the top-level navigation menu. This is already possible (to a certain extent) with the current Book.module and Menu.module - A 'Books' menu item is created in the user navigation by having the Book.module enabled. Menu.module allows you to enable/disable this menu item. Menu.module also allows you to re-name this menu item. But, this only helps if you only intend to have 1 book (or else the name 'Handbook' is misleading if the user finds more than 1 book listed). - so this isn't good enough (or is it). 1. I want to create a separate navigation block for the 'Drupal handbook'. This is what I was trying to figure out. Not just this, but a different way to do what Nysus was attempting. i.e. create a menu block for each and every book that is created. There is a way to write code that would (re)build a 'custom menu' on every add/edit/update to a book page - or book outline update. Custom menu's automatically have a block created for them. But, this I think would be a misleading use of the 'custom' menu - as the menu would not be custom if they are a part of core. So, I would think that two new constants could be added to the menu.inc file - MENU_BOOK_MENU - and MENU_BOOK_ITEM - each would behave as custom menu's, but would be reserved for books. These menu types should NOT show up in the Menu.module administration - because the administration of the book_menu items would be done by administering the book itself (adding an item, removing an item, moving an item up/down in the hierarchy, assigning parents etc.). However, the blocks that the book_menus would create would show up in the block administration (so users could enable/disable each block - and decide where on the site they show up). The existing book block logic would be removed. So the logic would be: If a creates a book in the book administration page - the Book.module automatically creates a new MENU_BOOK_MENU Any time a user adds to or updates or delets a book page - the entire book menu is deleted and recreated based on the hierarchy defined by the book itself. The blocks for each book would show up in block administration. Any thoughts - I know that this doesn't exactly address points 1 and 2 - but it could act as a first step. Is this approach a bad idea? It would add special conditions for the proposed book menu's - but books would be a special case. Even if people don't like this solution, maybe it will give someone a better idea. I'd love to hear them. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 21, 2004 - 22:55 : Boris Mann +1 to this andre I had promised to put down my thoughts on this matter, as it relates to 1) primary and secondary links and how they are managed and 2) auto-generation of primary/secondary navigation based on book outlines So, for 1), we currently have functional-but-not-very-usable plain textfields to manage primary and secondary links. I would like to see menu.module used to control all navigation links, whether it is the navigation block or primary/secondary links. What is needed: a) default system menus labelled "primary" and "secondary" which would store; this is where modules could insert navigation b) support for full URLs (e.g. http://myexternaldomain.com) instead of just path 2) if we got 1 working, and andre does his book menus, this could get taken care of automatically. Basically, for brochureware/business/etc. sites that have static content, you could have a root book as one of the primary navigation links, and then the secondary links are generated automatically. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 22, 2004 - 21:02 : Dries I agree with Andre that the book module's integration with the menu system needs to be worked on. I support any effort that makes it easier to structure pages and that makes it easy to link pages/nodes from within a menu. However, I'm opposed to putting book module specific names in the menu system (eg. MENU_BOOK_MENU and MENU_BOOK_ITEM). I can imagine a handful of modules that want to maintain a menu tree (or part thereof) so I'm in favor of generic names. I'd have to read up on the menu system code, but last time I checked there was a MENU_MODIFIABLE_BY_ADMIN flag. You could choose not to set this flag for the menu items generated by the book module. Maybe it's already possible to implement to implement Andre's suggestion without having to modify/extend the menu system. Are you exploring this path? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 24, 2004 - 10:01 : andremolnar I've had a few spare hours to work on this. I've started to cobble together a solution - but in doing so I discovered a bug in the menu module (for which I will submit a seperate issue - if one doesn't already exist). The principal I suggested works. I added some code to the book module that creates custom menu's (MENU_CUSTOM_MENU with MENU_CUSTOM_ITEMs) for each Book that exists in a site. This is just as a proof of concept - I chose this menu type to start with because they automatically have a block created for them in admin/block (which is ultimatly the functionality we want). I ran a test and the menus are created as expected - the blocks are also created. But when I tested the menu blocks by enabling them I ran into a problem. It seems as though the menu system does not expand/explode sub menu items if the node type is book. I'm not sure why this is, and I haven't traced the source code yet - I thought I would ask if anyone has intimate knowledge of the menu system if they can point me in the right direction. No patch attached because until that problem is fixed this proposed change won't fly :( andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 24, 2004 - 11:11 : Dries Just a wild guess: maybe it doesn't work because the book module's URI scheme is not hierarchical? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 7, 2005 - 10:45 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_module_1.patch (5.1 KB) I finally took some time out to do some work on this. As mentioned in a post to dev the problem I was having with menus not expanding/contracting properly was some crud in my database. Once that was cleared up my changes worked fine. I am attaching a patch for comments and for the brave willing to give it a test drive. History: This thread and http://drupal.org/node/15198 and http://drupal.org/node/15153 node/15198 has a patch that is required for this patch to work. What this does: Pretty straight forward. Any time a user adds/updates/deletes book or book pages (including via outline) - a function is called to create a new menu for each book. Any existing book menus are wiped out and then the new book menus are inserted - and the system menu is rebuilt to reflect the changes. The menus created consist of type MENU_MODULE_MENU and MENU_MODULE_ITEM. These menus show up in the menu/admin page so that admins can be aware of them, but the menu types are not editable via menu/admin (all changes are handled by the book module). Since the menus are in the menu table, the menu_block() hook handles the creation of the blocks for each of them. The blocks can then be administered in the usual ways via the block/admin interface. KNOWN ISSUE: (suggested solutions welcome) Since the menu table is updated on every change to books - the blocks associated with the menus are also recreated with default settings (i.e. disabled, and with no path or throttle settings) requiring a user to take an extra step and re-configure the book blocks for viewing on their site. I think this is unacceptable. For the casual user of the book module that only has a single book that doesn't change often, this would not be a big deal. But, if anyone wanted to make use of book module to handle dynamic site navigation this would create more work than it saves. Looking forward: If the block generation issue can be solved in a tidy way, this patch could allow users to use book to handle all their site navigation generation needs. Also, this patch could allow for the removal of a large chunk of code in the book module dedicated to building its own block via the block system. I left it there for now because I suppose there may be those out there that want to have book.module work the way book.module always worked (only show the book block when viewing a book page). Even so, since each book would have its own block, an admin could specify when and where the block shows via admin/block. I would appreciate feedback. If nothing else I hope this gives someone some new ideas. I'll continue to work on the block regeneration issue. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 7, 2005 - 10:47 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_module_2.patch (4.98 KB) sorry - here's a patch with prefered line breaks. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 7, 2005 - 16:47 : nysus Andre, I've been meaning to give this a throrough look when I get a chance. Hopefully this weekend. ---Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2005 - 02:02 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/book_module_3.patch (6.66 KB) Here is an updated patch. Same comments as followup 51 - except that the known issue has been resolved. This changes book module so that any action taken on a book, including adding new books or book pages will create a menu in the menu system for that book - and thus create blocks for those menus that can be administered in the usual ways. This is my first attempt at a major patch to core - comments are welcome I will be happy to update documentation once revisions to the code have been taken care of. andre -- View: http://drupal.org/node/14120 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/14120

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Re: [drupal-devel] Introduction and Questions
by Steven Wittens 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

>See, that's why my module is so small. I'm learning the process rather than >coding anything important ;-) > > My comment about your module being small was in no was a negative thing. We like small, efficient code. I was merely saying that there wasn't much to comment on. Steven Wittens

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[drupal-devel] blog it menu link
by Jeremy Andrews 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

Hello, I'm trying to create a simple "blog it" menu option in one of my modules, but I'm unclear on the proper way to do this. So far, the best I've come up with is something ugly like: $_GET['edit']['body'] = "this is a 'blog it' test."; print theme('page', node_add('blog')); Is there a proper way to do this, utilizing drupal_goto to fix the URI? Perhaps the problem is that I'm not using a form button to get there...? (Using a submit button is not an option) Thanks, -Jeremy

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[drupal-devel] [feature] Proposed change to menu.inc that would allow modules to create custom menus
by andremolnar 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: menu system Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: andremolnar Reported by: andremolnar Updated by: andremolnar Status: patch I've uploaded the latest version of the patch to book. http://drupal.org/node/14120 andre andremolnar Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 6, 2005 - 07:13 : andremolnar Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/menu_inc_2.patch (2.65 KB) See http://drupal.org/node/15153 and http://drupal.org/node/14120 for discussion on this proposed change. Patch is included here for further discussion (with the changes suggested by Dries). A patch is forthcoming for topics discussed in http://drupal.org/node/14120 which would make use of this patch. Status to be changed to patch later if there are no objections following discussion. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 8, 2005 - 21:16 : andremolnar Patch making use of this is now added to http://drupal.org/node/14120. andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 10, 2005 - 07:29 : andremolnar Just realising that the rules for setting status to patch would allow this to be patch since its technically ready to go. (and it might actually get noticed if its on the dev list and patch queue). andre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 11, 2005 - 06:47 : Dries I'm OK with this patch but won't commit it yet until the book module patch is ready. -- View: http://drupal.org/node/15198 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/15198

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