Chad Phillips -- Apartment Lines wrote:
On Apr 11, 2008, at 1:37 AM, Earl Miles wrote:
I'm not sure Views originated this technique; but then again, I'm not sure it didn't.
i'm pretty sure i was the first person to do this. which either makes me a visionary or a bastard depending on how you look at it... ;)
Are the two really that mutually exclusive? How about both ;).
my personal opinion is that core should be more informative about what happens for something as important as a module installation. without the messages i currently hack into my own modules, the only way a user knows anything happened at all is by scrolling down the mile long list of checkboxes, and making sure that their module is now marked as enabled -- lame. Agreed. At the core of this discussion is the desire to determine the types of message communications that drupal has to communicate and how they should be handled. Here is my list of suggestions off the cuff:
1. Errors - these are php generated warnings and problems (e.g. mysql errors, missing directories/files, and foreach warnings) that have been caught by modules and forwarded to the msg queue system. 2. Status - These are regular messages that reflect or confirm the success of operations on users, content and settings in the system. (e.g. "Post created", and "setting set") 3. Information/instruction - The could be instructions for further inspection or for future consideration regarding operations like having installed a module (e.g. "You can configure this module <a>here</a>") or created a content type (e.g. "Add some fields by clicking on the add fields tab") 4. Extended/Debug - While many of us prefer debuggers sometimes it is nice to see an extended log of the operations that are important for quick diagnosis of the probelm or just to shepherd the process with al ittle more mental certainty that all went well. This wouldnt be a recreation of the devel module query log or anythign similar and would only show those "debug" messages that have been output by the modules that fired. (e.g. "Required tables created", "Imagecache tables and files purged") These are the 4 main types of messages i can think of that i would like to get from drupal. I may have missed some, please correct if i have. Following PHP's bitwise comparison operator and assigning these different message types simple integers that are able to be compared in a bitwise fashion opens up a number of opportunities for setting "site wide" (Admin > site information"), role wide (access permission?) or user specific (user edit page) output preferences for system messages. define("DRUPAL_MESSAGE_ERROR" 1); define("DRUPAL_MESSAGE_STATUS" 2); define("DRUPAL_MESSAGE_INFORMATION" 4); define("DRUPAL_MESSAGE_DEBUG" 8); The line isnt always black and white and in the end it would be up to the developer of the module to decide what type of message one should be. This is only a slight extension of the existing system and a formalization of the status types into constants but i think it solves a number of the issues if we implement the bitwise comparison operator message settings properly for users or roles if those are desired characteristics. -- Michael Favia michael@favias.org tel. 512.585.5650 http://michael.favias.org