[development] Early Drupal 6 review from Chris Messina

[Greg Knaddison]

On Nov 12, 2007 6:10 AM, Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel at free.fr> wrote:
> Options should be:
> - thrown away if useless (e.g. don't ask me to enable a feature, I
>   have enabled the module already).
> - detected automatically whenever possible (and thrown away).
> - rationally grouped together when they must stay.

How about one more option on that list:

- Hidden, but configurable by admins

I am quite embarrassed by the current pathauto admin settings page.[1]

It is _insanely_ long.  But many people have begged to have those
features added so I can't just drop features.  So what else can I do?
I don't think there is any way to "detect automatically" on any of
these items.  Splitting them onto separate pages masks the problem and
just requires more clicking and page refreshes.

My proposal is to remove the UI for infrequently used features,
document them in the readme, and allow people to set them via a
general variable editor or via the settings.php  For example, in 99%
of the cases the punctuation treatment should be "replace by
separator".  The module can default to that and allow overrides via
variables set in the settings.php

Any good reasons not to do this?  Does anyone besides flk and me like the idea?

Thanks,
Greg

[1] http://drupal.org/files/images/pathauto_settings_5x_2x_expanded.png

PS I'll try not to repeat myself every day on this subject but I
explained this to flk in #drupal and he said that the first time I
mentioned it he didn't understand the value of it.  So, given the
relevant discussion by Xavier I felt I should raise it again.

-- 
Greg Knaddison
Denver, CO | http://knaddison.com
World Spanish Tour | http://wanderlusting.org/user/greg