[development] Early Drupal 6 review from Chris Messina

[Larry Garfield]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:49:06 +0000, Shakur <shakur at techarena.co.uk> wrote:
> Guys, Greg is using the pathauto module as an example of UI that
> contains to much info whether he should allow things to go allow
> features or not is really beside the point.
> What we talked about and the aim of his email was...how does cutting
> down of interface's by removing rarely used UI's sound
> e.g. in the comment setting page[1] there is frankly too much info which
> right allows a use who knows/wants to configure how comments are set to
> do so, but the truth of the matter is with most users the default
> setting suffices and all they care about is whether comments should be
> allow or not (default comment setting)...so why cant we remove those
> options we think are to detailed and have a variable setting in one
> place (setting.php?) whereby advance users can turn those on?

An undocumented feature (which anything done manually in settings.php is) is not a feature.  Even if we had an about: page somewhere that let people directly edit the variables table (which would depend on the variable-defaults hook that some were working on for D6 but weren't able to finish), we would be remiss if we didn't document all of the settings there.  Then we're right back where we started, just on a different, larger page.

Bear in mind, the sort of thing that Firefox puts in about: is much more esoteric than what we're talking about.

--Larry Garfield