[development] node type without a title?

[Ken Rickard]

Jeremy wrote

> I agree that titles, whether
> explicitly specifed or whether pattern-generated, should be required
> and should be unique.


Jeremy-

I must *strongly* disagree.

Forcing unique titles is a bad path, for a number of reasons, especially in
import/export routines.

For sites that want to use Drupal as CMS and run external content, titles
tend to repeat.

Use case (in production):

We run a daily newspaper through XML/RPC import into Drupal.  Each day,
there are at least 3 articles that always have the same title (see, for
example, 'Letters to the Editor'  at http://new.savannahnow.com/node/133628
).

If you enforce unique title constraints, you break the publishing model.

If we want to use duplicate titles, we should be able to.  It is not the
place of the CMS to impose that rule on us.

For newspapers (and other periodicals), readers (and writers, and editors)
expect certain content to have the same title every day.  That's how they
find things.  And, no, using taxonomies won't solve that problem.

- Ken Rickard
agentrickard



> My importexportapi module, for example, treats the 'title' field as
> required and as unique, because it is the only field suitable for
> being an 'alternate key' for nid (i.e. a reliable but more
> human-friendly identifier, that can be used instead of nid).This is
> just one more case where having guaranteed unique titles is very
> useful.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20060908/21826c79/attachment.htm