[development] Body and teaser as fields

[Darrel O'Pry]

Maybe teaser is just a formatter for body?

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Karen Stevenson <karen at elderweb.com> wrote:

> +1 on getting rid of the teaser splitter -- I've been using css to hide it
> :) The teaser splitter could become a contrib field module, if anyone wants
> to save it.
>
> On auto-creating both a body and a teaser field -- is there a way to skip
> creating a second field for all the sites where the teaser is just a subset
> of the body? We really only need two fields if they have different content.
> I suppose it's a lot simpler to just automatically create it in all cases,
> so maybe simplicity wins out.
>
> The only other question I have is what happens when there is no official
> 'body' field that other modules might expect to find. I guess we've already
> made the body optional so they should not be expecting that anyway. Is there
> any reason why losing a field that has had special meaning could be a
> problem to contrib modules?
>
> Karen
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:20 PM, Barry Jaspan <barry at jaspan.org> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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