webchick.net

Still stuck... er, I mean... visiting ;) Boston after Drupalcon, thanks to a lovely winter storm in Canada that refuses to go away. Karen Stevenson was nice enough to put me up in her hotel room for a night, so I wanted to pay her back by making this important issue my "itch of the week": we need to figure out a data model in order to move CCK fields in core efforts forward. See Karen's Field Structure thread for more details.

Currently, regular old single-value fields (like "first name") are easy. Just cram 'em in the content type table. But when you start moving into more advanced areas like shared fields (such as a "picture" field that's attached to both "book" and "video game" content types), or multiple-value fields (such as a group of checkboxes for "interests"), those currently get split off into their own tables in order to normalize things. Moving fields to and from multiple value and shared has always been a harrowing process, involving table structure manipulation and data migration. However, with the abstraction brought on by the new Schema API in core, this suddenly became a lot tougher.

A couple of options have been proposed, which include a de-normalized schema per content type (leading to a bunch of NULL values for multivalue fields and data duplication for shared fields), and a "each field in its own table" approach, which involves many (sometimes MANY many) joins, which can kill performance on a large site.

So, calling all database schema experts, SQL gurus, performance nuts, etc. We need your help. We need to make sure we're not missing any obvious options that would make this work more slickly, and we also need some help benchmarking to determine what the best option is going to ultimately be. Please head over to http://groups.drupal.org/node/9297 and post your thoughts!

This week's itch is another usability itch: adding example text to all textfields in core. There's work there in process to do stuff like emulate the Yahoo! registration form, where a faded-out example value is placed in initially, and disappears when the box gets focus:

On browsers that lack JS support, the example text will just be displayed next to the box.

How does this work?

I noted in my Drupal 7.x Personal Battleplan that I was going to focus on Usability and QA stuff this go around. So I've started a new segment called "itch of the week" to keep track of the efforts I'm working on to that effect. It'll be interesting (well... to me and probably no one else :P) to see if I can keep up with these weekly or not. ;)

Anyway. The first itch goes to.... permission descriptions!

This is a patch that was originally written by kkaefer way back in fall of 2005. It came back on my radar when I was observing Marci working with Drupal on her blog and struggling to figure out what the various options meant. It further came back on my radar when I heard a support request come in from a client about why their editor could see private site content intended only for administrators. Permissions are sometimes poorly named (I've come across some doozies in contrib :P) or have other implications that are not immediately obvious, such as roles with "administer nodes" permission bypassing any access control on content. This patch attempts to make these more obvious to folks.

Anyway, if this sounds like something that's interesting to you, please help review the patch, and we'll see if we can get it into Drupal 7.x. :)