On Tuesday 06 September 2005 08:45 pm, Khalid B wrote:
Can you provide a few examples of where this would actually make sense? I'm not coming up with any where the correct answer is "well if you named it and explained it better on the normal settings page then it wouldn't be so 'confusing', now would it?" :-)
For anyone who have been following development, there are so many times where the discussion goes like this:
A: I need a new feature X to be added. Here is the patch. B: The option is fine, but we have to preserve existing behavior. A. Here is a revised patch with an option to turn it on. C. No. More options means confusion and clutter. -1. D. Let us have the option in $conf in settings.php where it is hidden. .... ad nauseum.
So, this is my proposal: provide the option for those who want it and keep it out of site from the rest.
Well, then the answer is to not have so many people knee-jerk C. :-) More options need not automatically mean more clutter, if organized properly. A better solution, IMHO, would be to allow mult-tab settings pages. You can already hack this using MENU_LOCAL_TASK, and I have, but having some way to get the settings page magic would be nice. You can already group settings to an extent using fieldset, but if you want an extra layer of grouping then settings tabs are the way to go. We'd need a $delta parameter added to hook_settings(), and some way to let the the settings system know that there are multiple tabs. hook_block() would be a good model to follow, methinks. That way, the module developer can group lots of options more logically than just with fieldsets if they want, including putting "lesser used" options onto a further-right tab. If they want to be lazy and call one of them "advanced" we can't stop them, but at least then module devs have the opportunity to provide better organization if there are lots of options to be had. (Or we could support Javascript-based tabs, so that they're all technically the same form but get hidden/unhidden. Perhaps that could even be mapped to the existing fieldsets. I've been meaning to figure out how best to do that...) Of course, I'd rather see many of the configuration pages under admin moved to be tabs under settings as well, but not all of those are easily organized into just setting variables. :-) -- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson