[development] Body and teaser as fields

[Ronald Ashri]

Absolutely makes sense for me to remove Body and Teaser - talking from a 
user's/developer's perspective I've spent enough time trying to remove 
them already - they almost never quite work for what I am trying to do. 
Based on how we use Drupal at times even Title is an inconvenience, but 
I guess removing that as well would create more problems than solve.

What we could then do is provide more useful content types for users to 
start with - in the case of Page and Story simply changing the field 
names would be enough to help people.

For example a page could be a Title and Content, but a story would be 
Title, Post (a more blog-like name), Teaser (as a separate field - 
because although the js divider idea is a nice one it is confusing to 
people and does not fit the needs of a story too often). We could then 
also add other types as examples for people.

Anyway, I am sure the far more sophisticated usability testing going on 
is going to throw up all these issues.

Best,

Ronald

Moshe Weitzman wrote:
> core would get rid of it. and there will be much rejoicing in usabilty land.
>
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Matt Farina<matt at mattfarina.com>  wrote:
>    
>> On the UI side including the teaser splitter JavaScript might be ugly. How
>> would we handle this special case? Or, do we get rid of the teaser splitter?
>>
>>
>> On Feb 10, 2009, at 11:20 PM, Barry Jaspan wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> Now that Field API is in core it is time to start using it.  I have an
>>> initial suggestion: change node body and teaser from special cases to normal
>>> fields.  I suspect this is going to be quite controversial so I thought I'd
>>> get some feedback here before evening bothering to start looking at the
>>> code.
>>>
>>> This message is not about the details of the implementation; I'm sure
>>> there will be subtleties and complexities to work.  I'm just asking about
>>> the concept.
>>>
>>> Concept:
>>>
>>> Remove all special processing for $node->body and $node->teaser.  Create
>>> two fields, body and teaser, both text fields.  Assign both fields to every
>>> existing content type with a "body field" using the textarea widget.  For
>>> existing nodes, as part of the upgrade path, initialize the teaser field
>>> value with whatever teaser would normally be generated automatically from
>>> the body.
>>>
>>> Random thoughts:
>>>
>>> - We will get to remove a bunch of code, much of it quite ugly, from
>>> node.module.
>>>
>>> - Sites that really want an auto-generated teaser can remove the teaser
>>> field from a content type and use the text field's teaser Display Formatter
>>> in the teaser context.
>>>
>>> - This will mean removing the body field from the node and node_revision
>>> tables, and creating a field_data_body table for it instead.  Don't worry
>>> about database query efficiency; that is a solved problem (see
>>> http://drupal.org/node/368674).
>>>
>>> - With $node->body and $node->teaser being normal fields, they will not be
>>> available for overloaded use as the complete rendered output of the node.
>>>   Hurray!  We can use $node->content = drupal_render($node) or something like
>>> that.
>>>
>>> - We might want to think about adding other fields to our default content
>>> types.  Perhaps Article should have a Subtitle field, etc.  This is a whole
>>> topic in itself.
>>>
>>> Comments?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Barry
>>>
>>>        
>>