Role Descriptions

Can you give a screenshot, so we can easily review.

Starter patch attached. I didn't have time to test (nor make screen shots) so I have no idea whether it even works. I'm bad about getting my quotation marks mixed up, but I'll let the bot test.

All the text there needed a bit of refresh, IMO. I also got rid of some -- IMO -- worthless "example" text, and banished the tags to outside the text like its neighbors.

Updated the patch. You forgot to 'return $output' at the end of that block of code.

Patch and images attached.

I am wondering whether this shouldn't just be in the help text of Roles?

Oops. I also misnamed the "administrator" role.

Fixed the name of the administrator role.

@Bojhan, it is in the help text of roles..

No as in, not on that page, but on a separate help page. It seems to be taking a lot of screen real estate. And after reading it once its useless.

I agree with you, but in another issue.

Let's just fix the text and then open another issue that can move the text around and make it a little more logical. We can tag that one with d7ux or usability or whatever the current tag is and it'll get some attention that way.

Here's an updated patch that removes the <em&rt; tags that were around the role names.

@cweagans : Agreed, looks good to me. If keith is fine with it as well I will mark RTBC

We can't hardcode that help text because the administrator role is only created as part of the default install profile, but not as part of the minimal install profile. Plus, as you can see on the roles administration page, the 'administrator' role can also be renamed or deleted.

I think this is a "won't fix", unless we make the patch a lot more generic and allow people to provide a description or explanation for custom role. That would require more extensive UI changes; i.e. below each role we could provide a description in small print like we did on the permissions administration page. We could then eliminate (rework) parts of the help texts. Could be a really nice clean-up.

Dries is spot on. We probably need to add a "description' to roles like we did for user permissions, and then in the help text on this page, just mention that a number of roles may be preinstalled by the installation profile.

Ohh, no lets not add in functionality for descriptions. Sorry, but I'd rather just kill this text - then spend days working on a viable implementation of help text. I don't see many people not understanding what anonymous, autenticated user and administrator means.

Bojhan:

1. adding descriptions for roles is not that big of a paradigm shift, and follows right in line with what was done with permissions. A single line under a small number of roles is likely to be much less intrusive than the text on this page. That seems, to me, to be the absolutely most straightforward -- and helpful -- way to proceed.
2. Removing help text is not the answer for all situations.
3. We've all spent months and months on more viable implementations of help text. (See #299050: Help System - Master Patch.)
4. Yes, these names are fairly self explanatory. But role names are user entered, and they may not all be as easy to grasp. What if someone created the role name of, for the sake of argument, "editor" and "editor - full". In that case, even if I created them, I might not remember two weeks later what the difference between them might be. Making a note to myself in a role description would seem like a good thing in this case.

Yeah, I'm with keith.smith and Dries on this one.

I'll start hacking on this and see if I can't come up with something decent.

I attacked this #393406: make roles admin look like content types previously.

I don't see many people not understanding what anonymous, autenticated user and administrator means.
This is way off the mark. We are trying to make these "default roles" for anonymous visitors and authenticated users configurable and the decsription WILL help distinguish them when that is the case.

#468768: Remove hardcoded anonymous and authenticated user roles is taking an interesting approach at this and i think it is a bit heavy handed. i would prefer just allowing users to edit the names and descriptions of the original roles as i had done in my patch. If we somehow attach the notification that this is the "authenticate user role" we have a real win win imo.

Keiths 4th pont is also key imo.

Yeah, +1 to descriptions, but it looks like you already have a good portion of this done in #393406: make roles admin look like content types, so I'll mark this as duplicate.

Lets make #393406: make roles admin look like content types happen -- big win for Drupal :)