Titles limited to 128 characters [#100340]

It seems that node titles, and therefore biblio reference titles, are hard-coded to 128 characters in Drupal 4.7. Maybe it's just me, but I have a lot of articles with longer titles than that. The solution is to change the MySQL table to be, say, 256 characters and fiddle with some internal Drupal code. But this may be too much for a lot for folks.

Is it possible to move the title to its own biblio field with a longer length (like 256) and just assign a shortened version (within 128 characters) for the node title? It seems a bit awkward to have each reference title hard-wired to the node title.

BTW, this is a simply amazing module.

Comments

Comment #1

rjerome commented 29 November 2006 at 14:39

Yes, I've run into this one myself. I will change this in an upcoming release so that, as you suggest, the titles are stored in the biblio table.

Ron.

Comment #2

techczech commented 29 November 2006 at 14:45

This would be a great feature. I would further suggest that the node title is shortened to just the author and year - or even just 'Publication' or something like it, and the node displays the formatted citation. Right now, it is sometimes confusing for users to figure out what they are looking at and plays even more havoc with pathauto.

Comment #3

rjerome commented 29 November 2006 at 15:00

I've been having this discussion off line with another user. And the thought was that there should be no links to the "node" view if there was no additional information was provided. Then if there is addional information to be had, the citation would be output at the top of the page followed by any additional info like the abstract, URL, or full text.

Is this along the same lines as you were thinking?

Comment #4

techczech commented 29 November 2006 at 15:07

Similar. But it would still be useful to be able to link to individual biblio nodes even if they contained just a simple reference with no additional information.

Comment #5

ohzbees commented 1 December 2006 at 00:04

I think the nodes need to be available from the biblio list, otherwise it can be a little awkward to access & edit them. The title of the node should be descriptive of the node, otherwise it will be next to impossible to choose a node from standard lists like "recent posts" I like having the node title reflect the full reference title (and maybe having some kind of BibTex-like key). My only problem was that the whole title sometimes got cut off.

Comment #6

rjerome commented 1 December 2006 at 02:04

Good point with regards to the editing, I guess the question remains as to what the preferred "node" format is? Do people want the Author: Source: URL: Items split out as they are now or if there is "full text" available, should this be all that is shown?

BTW, I will be adding a "biblio-key" soon much like a BibTex key [auth][year][U] where [auth]=first authors last name, [year]=year (dah) and [U]=is {a,b,c...} to make it unique.

Comment #7

techczech commented 1 December 2006 at 13:51

I think Author-Year[a/b/c] would be enough even for the listing of items in the Node list. We're running into a limitation of Drupal here - node titles and displayed titles are always the same even if it often makes sense to separate them - I think there was a module somewhere that helped modify that behavior - Biblio might be a candidate for doing the same.

Comment #8

rjerome commented 1 December 2006 at 15:15

I'm not sure what you mean by

node titles and displayed titles are always the same even if it often makes sense to separate them

Could you elaborate?

Comment #9

techczech commented 1 December 2006 at 23:01

I occasionally run into problems with needing to give long descriptive titles to nodes but not wanting to have them displayed the same everywhere. For instance in a journal article, I have a title and a subtitle for the article that I would like to be separate from the nodetitle but I still need to put in a node title that gets displayed. The same goes for bibliographic entries. Another example is using CCK and usernode. I need a first and last name as separate fields for profiles to allow for sorting but I also need to have a nodetitle for the usernode. It would be nice to have an option where the title wouldn't have to be part of the node but just an ID and would be displayed where a nodetitle should be displayed as something generic. That's not to say that I can't get around that - simply that I have to figure out ways of getting around that. It get particularly difficult when you have to explain some of these things to end users who in effect have to deal with something that is a result of how Drupal does things and not how the needs of a site make sense. I'm not sure if this is relevant to this discussion, though, but that's what I was referring to.