Add description to Page Status taxonomy terms displayed on book pages

Term message only has a beta release for 5.x, and no issue about a 6.x upgrade. :( So long as those two facts remain true, I think it's going to be impossible to convince the d.o maintainers to install it for this purpose.

On a whim, I just checked out the term_message directory and found some other unsettling issues:
- All the messages for all terms are stored in a giant variable, which would have to be loaded and unserialized on every d.o page load. :(
- Various code style problems.
- There are a handful of code blocks that are just commented out.
- There appear to be some bugs in how db_query() is used in a few places.
...

In general, I'd rather we used high quality modules to accomplish something we need instead of doing a d.o-specific hack in the theme or in drupalorg.module. Makes it more likely that other people will contribute to upgrading, maintaining and improving the functionality. However, I'd say term_message needs a fair bit of work (and possibly a backend redesign to not rely on variables for everything) to be suitable for use on d.o.

Note: This could be very useful for release nodes with their "Release type" taxonomy terms, and potentially other vocabs we want to add (e.g. for project nodes to mark them "unsupported", "abandoned", "needs maintainer", etc) which is another reason I'd rather see a more general-purpose solution than a bluebeach hack.

So, if you feel like rallying your energy into making term_message rock solid and upgrading it to D6, I'd support installing it for this purpose...

Cheers,
-Derek

I wrote Term Message as a proof of concept as a way to keep nodes from being deleted off Drupal.org (but just deprecated and marked as such). Since the only purpose of writing it was to be on Drupal.org (for me at this time, though I think it will be generally useful), I haven't put any work in since.

My misgivings about putting everything in the variables table had already been confirmed by Moshe. In general I'm willing to make all improvements and modifications to make it good for D6 and d.o. Willing and by some reports able to learn. (Disclosure: Using CVS for is still a friction for me. Part of my general weakness as a module maintainer.)

add1sun, do you want me to add you as a co-maintainer now?

^{benjamin, Agaric Design Collective}

Queue Cleanup -

The http://drupal.org/project/term_message doesn't have a D6 release - is this still something being worked on or considered? Possibly tag with redesign?

I can do that. Missed Addi's message above, but definitely willing to work on D6 and necessary features for d.o.

Moving to Documentation to see if this is something desired. (Note: module in question doesn't have any D6-D7 releases.)

I personally don't think this is necessary. The status is highlighted much more now than it was when this issue was filed -- at least for people who can see colors, it is now in a colored box (though still, or rather again, at the top of the right sidebar). For instance, see the page status on these sample pages:
http://drupal.org/node/1021576 (no known problems)
http://drupal.org/node/202483 (insecure code)
http://drupal.org/node/28245 (needs technical review)
etc. You can find pages by status on http://drupal.org/documentation/manage

So... Even if we do feel we need an explanation added to the page status display, why would we need this Term Description module (which still has no 6.x, much less 7.x release)? I think a better implementation would be to put the descriptions into the taxonomy terms themselves (in core, every term has a "description" field on it), and use the theme layer, or the drupalorg module (probably drupalorg -- I think that is where the taxonomy information is moved to the right sidebar anyway and separated out by taxonomy type) to display the term descriptions for the page status. That is about 2 lines of code, and would be portable to Drupal 7 (a major concern now).

Anyway, I'll leave this issue open for discussion for now. Any thoughts?

Agreed with #8 for the technical approach. If we need a description, let's just use core instead of a separate contrib.

That said, not sure we actually need more description for this. ;) I'll let others debate that.

Cheers,
-Derek

There has been no discussion here for 11 years, therefore closing.