A rant about substandard modules
reubidium - June 21, 2009 - 21:51
AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHH
Yet another weekend wasted hunting down a MAJOR bug that was introduced by a module which was flagged as "released". block_submit being the particular offender. It is "released" yet it will break any form which has multiple buttons as it removes the 'op' element from $_POST.
So burned out I'm getting on this. I've wasted umpteen hours with situations like this. I'm so burned out on it, actually, that I think this will be my last Drupal development project.
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As I'm sure you're aware... Drupal modules are made by a huge variety of contributing developers. Some are beyond amazing and for all intents and purposes quite near "perfect". Others are by less competent developers (or at least haven't learned the Drupal API yet). If a module is widely used by the Drupal community, it is bound to be in great shape. More esoteric modules that meet custom/special needs of a limited set of sites are less likely to have the eyes of enough experts on them to be coded up to par if the original developer didn't have the knowledge/skill required. The more of the uncommon specialized modules you use (e.g. there are only 50 websites reportedly using Block submit), the more likely you will experience issues and the more you may have to contribute code/fixes yourself to get the desired result from the modules. Fortunately in Drupal you actually "can" fix them by contributing patches (or at least bug reports if you can't code the fix). You can even get co-maintainership of a project if you think you can make it better than it is.
Anyhow, short of coding every module you need yourself, I seriously doubt the situation will be any different with any other open source CMS or framework. In fact in most the situation is "less" likely to be as good, since most others don't offer a central version controlled and support/project system for their modules (they may list them all, but most are actually hosted off site on a plethora of 3rd party sites). In Drupal it is indeed a bit hard on the current site (though fixed on the pending new drupal.org) to sift good modules from bad... though some of what you can do is check the usage stats, check the maintainer's user page to see how active they are and what other modules they've made, and also give more weight in your decision to modules by known-good developers (e.g. just to name a few, greggles, eaton, sun, merlinofchaos, karens, michelle, and a variety of others you'll see are beyond excellent in their contributions to Drupal). Also for now you can check reviews of modules on drupalmodules.com. Always test unknown modules on a separate test site before adding them to a real site (I keep a demo site running where I can drop in any module I want to take for a test drive).
If block submit module isn't working, have a look at the .js files of the Genesis or Blueprint themes which have jQuery code to block duplicate submissions for at least the main cases (e.g. nodes/comments/registration). I haven't tested in any other use cases, but for those it works fine.
-- David
davidnewkerk.com | absolutecross.com
View my Drupal lessons & guides
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Don't waste your time david-- a quick look at the 'contributions' of the op over his 1 yr + 42 weeks as a participant on drupal.org will place this post in the proper context-- cat >> /dev/null. Anyone who can be a member for that long and never so much as answer a question for someone in the forums has some audacity making such a post. quite unbelievable actually. sheesh.
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.
Sounds like a Ruby comment
Come on, we're a supposed to be a community here. There are plenty of good neighbors in all communities that don't interact in public, but that doesn't mean they aren't good neighbors. Same thing online. I prefer to help people face to face as opposed to forums, which doesn't make me any less of a community member.
I'm not saying this guy falls into this category and he very well could be a bad op, but saying "anyone" who doesn't answer forum posts is a bad op is an easy way to offend a lot of people who do a lot for the project outside of Drupal.org.
Thats my rant for the day :)
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We are a 'community' -- but if one is going to make a rant in public, then there’s a high probably it will be judged relative to one's public contributions. That’s also a feature of online communities and communication. Granted there’s no way to account for nonpublic contributions, but clearly the op managed to participate in public when it came to satisfying their own needs. Four pages of tracker posts for oneself is not “nonpublic”. And the one public post they make which is not directly related to solving a problem for themselves is a complaint about what they’ve been given freely? Give me a break.
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. There's far too many people that contribute hundreds and thousands of hours of time and effort here with no expectations of anything in return, so that whenever I see someone, who has ostensibly contributed nothing, has the temerity to complain about what they've benefitted from for free, I find that both rude and ungrateful.
And the simple fact is, almost every one of these types of posts come from someone who hasn’t so much as answered a single question for someone else.
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.
So, I have to be a caretaker
So, I have to be a caretaker of a forum in order to have a valid criticism?
Your little unix insult is pretty dated and pretty much tells me all I need to know about you, anyway.
And I actually work for a living. I don't have any time to be a caretaker for junior coders. There's enough self-important gas bags like yourself to fill that role anyway.
It's been a while since I've read anything that selfish
No, but actually contributing something back helps people judge if your rant is likely to just be selfish whining or not.
Wow ... and to quote something I heard recently, that pretty much tells me all I need to know about you, anyway.
Just about everyone else here works for a living too in case you hadn't noticed. But they recognise that they have got something for free from the Drupal community, but if nobody "pays it back" there won't be a Drupal community.
You can either be a positive influence in the community or not. As far as I can see, if you aren't prepared to be a positive influence, you shouldn't complain about the state of it and selfishly expect others to fix it for you for free while you are (presumably) earning money from their effort.
It is attitudes like yours (the one in the reply, not so much the original post) that burn out the goodwill of long time contributors and causes them to take a hard look at why they bother. If you can't see why that is a far more dangerous thing for the Drupal community than the presence of a few obscure unmaintained modules (that are easily spotted), your perspective is very myopic.
Was that supposed to be ironic?
--
Anton
Oh noes! Somebody dares to
Oh noes! Somebody dares to criticize the status quo! Quickly, attack his character while ignoring the arguments presented!
Grow up
Status quo? The status quo is the problem. You think I'd defend how good it is that contributors are overworked and underappreciated? Is that sustainable?
The status quo is that the community has a tiny number of contributors, a large number of relatively quiet lurkers, and a small number of whiners with inflated senses of entitlement wanting the tiny contributor group to do even more work for them.
I'll let you guess which group Drupal needs more of and which group Drupal needs less of.
The side effect of the latter group is they discourage anyone from the lurker group joining the contributor group, and eventually send some burnt out contributors back the the lurker group.
Do you really think anyone would be impressed by you ranting about a buggy module and then refusing to be part of the solution and calling valuable contributors self important gas bags? And now you're complaining about character attacks?
Who brought the first personal insult into this thread? I wasn't going to respond to your rant until I saw that comment.
You're also complaining about others ignoring your arguments!?! You didn't respond to a single point I made. Are you trying to be ironic again?
You haven't actually offered any arguments (or solutions) - just a vague rant that kinda boils down to bugs in released modules are bad. Well duh! Thanks for the insight.
--
Anton
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lol, right back at ya. Thanks for completely making my point, better than I ever could have, in your followups. Good luck with that attitude in open source.
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.
@Keyz: I agree. There are
@Keyz: I agree. There are quite a few exceptionally well designed, written, and tested modules. Stellar.
I'm a developer of 15 years, the past 3 of which have been 100% Drupal. I am finishing my fourth major Drupal site. I'm know merlinofchaos but I am a professional. As a professional, this is driving me crazy and quite honestly it makes me question the long term viability of Drupal as a strategic platform for my work.
There really needs to be a recognition that when a module is hosted on Drupal.org, and is listed as "released", that it draws from the reputation of Drupal as a whole when one comes across such blatant and glaring inadequacies as often as one does with this platform. Drupal is losing traction because of it. It IS a problem.
What's left after the rant
The element of truth here, after we drain off the rant, is that it can be frustrating trying to figure out which modules are reliable and which are not. I remember going through the entire contrib modules catalog 2-3 years ago and compiling a personal list of each module that I thought I might ever want to use. I tested each one to get a sense of how well it worked and how it compared to other modules with similar functionality. It took me a ton of time, and by the time I had finished, my list was already out of date. And that was back when the number of contrib modules was a small fraction of the number in existence today. If I were to try running the same assessment now, I might die of old age before I finished.
Drupalmodules.com is one step in the right direction for addressing this problem. Acquia's "packaged distribution" approach is another way of identifying the best modules and best practices. But there are other ways you can guess at the quality of a module by simply looking at the project page. In the case of block_submit, the module hasn't been modified since the day it was first uploaded (September 7 of last year). It also only has 55 users. Also, it has 8 bug reports, none of which have been addressed. Any one of these facts would have been a bit of a red flag for me.
As for the idea that buggy modules shouldn't be allowed on Drupal, I disagree. The way this community grows is by letting people experiment. No one starts out as Drupal rock stars. They learn by trying things and making mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes sit around for a while. If you want to be noble, you can fix it yourself and submit a patch. If you want to be normal, just submit a bug report and hope the owner fixes it for you. But I don't see a justification for complaining that buggy modules exist. Of COURSE they exist. If we didn't have the buggy modules, we wouldn't have many of the good ones either.
And I can't resist saying that language like "self-important gas bags" does nothing to win you any friends, and calls to mind some other phrases that end with "bag."
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Drupal is not losing traction
Drupal if anything is getting more and more traction because of the way it is built and allowing people to extend it. If am looking for a module to do something and end up installing a bad module I simple deactivate it, and either try to fix it or write my own. The ability to do just that is what makes Drupal the best possible platform for development.
Sure some modules are not written and tested very well. So? You go write a module and contribute it to the community and see how well you do before you bash the people, with your rash generalization, who are spending time doing that.
If you were a professional I think you would recognize the beauty of Drupal and the fact that it has thousands of people working together to make it the best it can be. You would recognize that sometimes what you need is not available and write a module yourself then contribute it back to the community. You would also see that for all your whining Drupal is saving you the time and effort of having to write 100% of the code for a web site, even if you get a crappy module and end up having to do some custom coding.
Adam A. Gregory
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Guys, I apologize. I'm just
Guys, I apologize. I'm just a bit burned out right now, being in the very last stages of a site development project. I wrote that post on Sunday, after pulling my hair out all weekend trying to discern why suddenly all the multi-button forms on my site had stopped working. I just got really steamed when I found the culprit (block_submit) and that it was marked as "released" when it was so completely broken in the tiny and specific functionality it had. That isn't something that is adequately tested, in my view. And this was not the first time I found myself in this boat.
I can only blame myself, of course, for not having the sense to realize sooner that the culprit had been with a recently installed module. Of course it would be.
This is what I get for three weeks of code savage without a day off.
Please ya'll try not to take my rants personally, like they apply to the whole community or something. I have great respect for the developers and designers involved. Their thinking in the design of Drupal is really quite zen and beautiful to me. Hence why I decided some years ago to make Drupal my core focus.
And I don't hang out in these forums, but I do hang out in the issue queues of modules I am interested in. And I do post patches and help with such things as I can.