[development] Being noisy on installation...

[Larry Garfield]

On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:00:38 -0500, Michael Favia <michael at favias.org> wrote:

*snip*

> Following PHP's bitwise comparison operator and assigning these
> different message types simple integers that are able to be compared in
> a bitwise fashion opens up a number of opportunities for setting "site
> wide" (Admin > site information"), role wide (access permission?) or
> user specific (user edit page) output preferences for system messages.
> 
> define("DRUPAL_MESSAGE_ERROR" 1);
> define("DRUPAL_MESSAGE_STATUS" 2);
> define("DRUPAL_MESSAGE_INFORMATION" 4);
> define("DRUPAL_MESSAGE_DEBUG" 8);
> 
> The line isnt always black and white and in the end it would be up to
> the developer of the module to decide what type of message one should be.
> 
> This is only a slight extension of the existing system and a
> formalization of the status types into constants but i think it solves a
> number of the issues if we implement the bitwise comparison operator
> message settings properly for users or roles if those are desired
> characteristics.

There actually is an RFC-defined standard for such message levels, which the watchdog system now uses as of Drupal 6.  If we are going to introduce more fine-grained message levels for drupal_set_message(), it should use the same standard.  (I'm not against the concept; it's interesting, but if we do it then as always it should be done right.)

In Boston, DmitriG and I were talking about install-profile-as-module and he suggested making the modules page into a multi-step form.  That is, after you select your new 3 modules, the next page you see is the permissions page for all roles but just for the modules you enabled.  That lets you do the initial permission set up immediately, before you get back to the modules page.  (You can, of course, still go to the permissions page at any time.)  He also suggested letting modules add their own config pages to a form that gets shown immediately after that, which would replace profile configuration.  That could also be useful for initial configuration for at least some modules.

(I make no claim to the above ideas; I am just relaying them.)

--Larry Garfield