[drupal-devel] [task] Typo on block admin page

Gabor Hojtsy gabor at hojtsy.hu
Sun Mar 6 14:38:14 UTC 2005


>>>>> 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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