On Friday 04 March 2005 13:46, drumm wrote:

Oh yeah.. throttle can disappear. And that other patch I made slipped in. Here is a better one.

I haven't tested the patch(es) yet, but assuming they work as advertised, a big +1 for the concept. Great idea! Scott -- -----------------------+------------------------------------------------------ Scott Courtney | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them scott@4th.com | having a bad operating system." -- Linus Torvalds http://4th.com/ | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999) | PGP Public Key at http://4th.com/keys/scott.pubkey

Op zondag 6 maart 2005 04:07, schreef Andre Molnar:

Sidebar is a bad name - it encourages the perpetuation of the stupid 3 column CMS paradigm, by making people think of block regions as "side bars".

+1 on regions instead of "sidebars". Bèr -- [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]

Morbus Iff wrote:

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Sidebar is a bad name - it encourages the perpetuation of the stupid 3 column CMS paradigm, by making people think of block regions as "side

+1 on regions instead of "sidebars".

+1.

Drupal uses the 3 column paradigm. As such, 'sidebar' is a lot less confusing. How about calling it 'column' which seems to have a bit of both? -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/

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Sidebar is a bad name - it encourages the perpetuation of the stupid 3 column CMS paradigm, by making people think of block regions as "side

+1 on regions instead of "sidebars".

+1.

Drupal uses the 3 column paradigm. As such, 'sidebar' is a lot less confusing. How about calling it 'column' which seems to have a bit of

I still like region better. The downside of "column" is that we'd never be able to happily and semantically do "wide" columns, like a header or footer (what the hell is a "header column"?). Likewise, it's difficult to imagine a column within a column, or a sidebar within a sidebar, but quite easy to imagine a region within a region. "Sidebar" may be less confusing in the short run, but naming parts of Drupal solely per the paradigm (ie. renaming "taxonomy" "categories", which still bums me out) is bad. Remember: the greatest honor of a paradigm is to be broken.

I agree with Dries in that the naming should reflect the current behaviour not some envisoned future feature set. Now blocks can only be 'left' or 'right', ie. in sidebars. I even think that 'columns' is worse then 'sidebars', since 'columns' relate to tables, while 'sidebars' cite the meaning of what we are talking about. If a patch is done and accepted to allow true regions, then it is more than fine to rename 'sidebars' to 'regions'. But until then, sidebar is more than suffice. But then the column header of the blocks table should also be renamed 'sidebar' and not 'region'. Drupal developers were not afraid of providing new names for old stuff, just see the 'access control' menu in the 4.6RC, or how bundles where renamed to categories in 4.5. BTW I was also against renaming taxonomy to categories in the menu, just for the record, but that does not matter now :) Goba

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I agree with Dries in that the naming should reflect the current behaviour not some envisoned future feature set. Now blocks can only be 'left' or 'right', ie. in sidebars.

No, that depends on the theme. It is perfectly ok to put one "sidebar" on top or at the bottom.

Yes, but it will still be called 'right' and 'left' in the block admin interface, and that is the point. Goba

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No, that depends on the theme. It is perfectly ok to put one "sidebar" on top or at the bottom.

Indeed. You can put both of them wherever you like, it's only the admin interface and class and ID attributes that refer to 'sidebar', 'right' and 'left'.

This isn't some future functionality, it's available right now, and these terms are already out of date.

+1 on Region

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Yes, but it will still be called 'right' and 'left' in the block admin interface, and that is the point.

All that shows is that we need to rethink the block admin too :) Block-region-1, Block-region-2?

It's going to be more confusing isn't it - we're back to the usual tension between making it powerful and flexible vs making it easy for novice admins...

Unless someone comes up with some names in place of 'left' and 'right', this discussion is going nowhere. Goba

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Unless someone comes up with some names in place of 'left' and 'right', this discussion is going nowhere.

Perhaps we need to come up with some mechanism for the theme to name those regions, and have that name show up in the block admin page. Thus, most existing themes would in fact name them "left" and "right" but some other theme could name them "region 1" and "region 2."

At a minimum we need to consider that eventually the block admin page is going to have to deal with blocks which will never end up on the "left" or "right" of the page, and thus using those terms will remain confusing.

We are talking about a short term solution now. 4.6 will go out with 'sidebar' as grouping titles, 'region' as column name and 'left' and 'right' as column values, unless this is changed. The code now contains these. 4.6 is not going to have a mechanism for themes to specify the regions. We are looking for a good short term solution. Goba

Gabor Hojtsy wrote:

We are talking about a short term solution now. 4.6 will go out with 'sidebar' as grouping titles, 'region' as column name and 'left' and 'right' as column values, unless this is changed. The code now contains these. 4.6 is not going to have a mechanism for themes to specify the regions. We are looking for a good short term solution.

Goba

For 4.6, I suggest we be consistent and just call them left or right sidebars. Sorry that I did not make it clear I was talking about "the future" beyond 4.6. -- Chris Johnson

Op maandag 7 maart 2005 00:11, schreef Steven Wittens:

The big roadblock for custom theme regions is having multiple themes per site. This is a valid use case (sections.module, or even a 'mobile' theme for PDA/Cell phones). I'd suggest you check out some earlier discussions on this in the archives.

This indeed is a problem. But can we not tackle it right here and now? My proposal: 1) a theme registers all its regions by returning an array from a called hook_regions. These should be choosed from a documented lists of "suggested good defaults". 2) the engine caches these, in a smart way: private (only in theme X), globals (in more than one theme), leftovers (only in one theme, not the same as private). 3) The UI presents these regions, overlapping is solved. (eg box_grey gives "header" and so does friendseletric, we should have only one "header"). The UI has a flag to define a *default* region. 4) The regions are now iterated as follows: 4.1) Global regions are filled by engine and cached per role and engine. (like now) 4.2) Private regions are filled by theme and cached per role and theme 4.3) Leftovers are appended to the default region and cached per role and theme 5) theme_page($content, $region='all') collects all these strings either from cache or from a rebuild, and returns them as HTML. $region can be 'all' (same as now) or $region ='none' only content area is returned (for popups, and performance!) or a string (I can see some nice uses for this, but ATM not yet used) ($region=header, to print only the header area) or $region ='none'. The naming has been discussed on drupal.org a lot already. I think, that if we agree on this issue Steven raises, we have more then enough said and documented to make up a nice program of demands for this module. Only thing is that we then need to find someone with ten fingers (or less) and a brain with some PHP and Drupal code in it, to actually make it. Hell, I might even volunteer for this, but I have to ask my client first. :) Regards, Bèr -- [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]