[development] Early Drupal 6 review from Chris Messina

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Greg Knaddison <greg at pingvox.com>:

> 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?
>

I use pathauto so I hope you don't mind if I pick on only one of the 
settings, Punctuation settings.  For this group you could consider one 
field for the replacement character and another field for a list of 
characters to replace with that character.  One more field for a list 
of characters to remove and everything else would then be no action.

I think the variable editor idea is a bit on the dangerous side.  Too 
prone to errors for the majority of those using it (I want to say 75% 
but I have no statistics).  While good experienced administrators could 
benefit from it; the inexperienced may well flood the lists.

Earnie -- http://for-my-kids.com/
-- http://give-me-an-offer.com/