By iantresman on

Hope I'm not jumping the gun, or pre-empting any official discussion, but I'd like to offer my (non-wish list) suggestions for Drupal 8, which is aimed at making it more consistent and more flexible.

Deprecate nodes

The problem I have with nodes, is that they come with a lot of baggage and inflexibility. I don't run a blog, and have never needed "posts" to have an author, revision dates, option for comments etc. And consequently there are a thousand modules required to "override" their inflexibility.

Replace nodes with "records" based on CCK, Views, Rules, Theme template engine

I'd like to see Drupal 8 based on core Fields, Views and Rules, and modules based around them. The huge advantage of this, is flexibility. For example, a node title is special text field that must appear first on a page. If a node title was a a standard CCK field, it could appear in a different order on a page, or even be a date field. I see Drupal 8 to be more like a standard relational database.

Extending CCK

I envisage CCK fields being a bit more flexible, so that I don't need new CCK modules. I should be able to define my own CCK data field formats, specifying how the data is verified, formatted and displayed. All we're really doing is displaying collections of data objects.

Modules

Modules would typically predefine and simplify the presentation of CCK, Views etc, and more advanced users could easily modify the CCK and Views set-up.

Pro and cons

I know this will affect how existing parts of Drupal works, eg. Permissions, but again, this is only another kind of content type. Blocks: why aren't these "nodes" of content type "blocks", etc.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 8.x

Comments

iantresman’s picture

iantresman commented

From the user's point of view, I think that Drupal's handling of images is poor. There are a lot of great modules out there, but out-of-the box image handling often have some features, but misses out others.

Great Features

Poorly handled features

  • WYSIWYG editor integrated Image Browser (IMCE promises a new "Box view" mode), and another module, TinyBrowser does this
  • Choosing whether an image is linked to
    • Another page (node)
    • A larger version of the same image
    • A Lightbox2 pop-up version of the same image
  • Adding an image caption:
    • Below an image
    • Above, or to the side of an image
    • Overlaid over the image
  • Formatting the image on the page
    • Adding margins and padding around each side of the image
    • Adding borders around each side of the image
  • Options to tweak the image on input (some of these are available via ImageCache)
    • Crop
    • Perspective crop
    • Deskew
    • Rotate
    • Brightness/contrast gamma adjustment
    • Full image edit via third party site (See Image Editor module)
  • Assign images to nodes, images galleries

While all these can be done, it is very very difficult to set-up, and tricky for an end user to use,

iandickson’s picture

iandickson commented

I'd like to see a simple option in set up - files are uploaded to user directories.

I'd also like to be able to set "if content deleted, delete files" or perhaps (if that is hard re files used by multiple nodes) a tool to "find and remove unused files".

carlhinton’s picture

carlhinton commented

Can we finally include Views in core.

bojanz’s picture

bojanz commented

You guys do know that all development and discussion happens in the Drupal issue queue and that almost no developer looks at the forums?

I advise you to find the relevant issues in the queue and add your ideas or voice your support.

That said, Drupal already has what the parent is requesting (node-lite objects), and those are entities.
Drupal 7 has a very basic Entity API extended through the contrib module of the same name, while Drupal 8 will have a much more advanced Entity API, with parts already committed to git.

Image handling can always be improved, and a WYSIWYG editor is something that is commonly mentioned, but rarely worked on. Maybe you will be the one who finally makes it happen?
Views in core won't happen for D8 because many things need to happen first, some of which are handled by the Drupal 8 core initiatives (the Configuration initiative and the Web services - WSCCI initiative are relevant here). There's a relevant core issue on that which you can find.