Hi,

especially when upgrading CCK is not very intuitive and user friendly. If functional dependencies are not met, the CCK-based content types simply do not work anymore; e.g. if a widget/handler/whatever is missing or not properly upgraded/configured, the user has to guess what might not be in order; to figure out the problem, he/she has to review all content types by hand and try to evaluate what warnings/errors might lead to the content types not working anymore. Since content types might depend on each other (e.g. through node references) this is an tedious task. Also this is a major problem for the Drupal user experience since "all green" at ./admin/reports/status suggests that the Drupal installation is feeling well even it is broken (= does not work anymore) in truth.

To resolve that I'm requesting that CCK should report the status of missing handlers/widgets/whatever at ./admin/reports/status so that a user gets a clear understanding why his/her installation is not working anymore. I can not provide a patch for that, but I hope that this should not be too hard to implement since CCK seems to gather data about missing widgets/handlers/whatever is already already (but does not display it in a usefull manner).

Thanks & greetings, -asb

Comments

asb’s picture

asb commented

The last sentence was supposed to say that CCK reports missing widgets/handlers/whatever on the edit pages for each content type, so I'm assuming that this data is already there.

However, I can not "harvest" those warnings/errors since there is no central place where those are aggregated. E.g. when filtering ./admin/reports/dblog for "type: content" and "warning, error, critical etc." the report simply comes out empty. The only place where these errors/warnings show up are the edit pages for each content type.

Hopefully this makes clearer what I'm trying to say...

karens’s picture

karens commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

There is simply no easy way to implement something like that. All status messages are consolidated in the Manage fields screen and that's the place to look if you suspect problems or if things aren't working right. Trying to think of all the places where anyone might expect to see explanations and adding in code to analyze problems and display messages would be a very time-consuming project that no one has time to do. Plus all those new messages would need to be translated, so it would be additional work for the translators, too.