Hi All,
No doubt the devs are aware of this and are looking to correct it in the future, but I just thought I'd post it anyway just so they know it is a "real" problem for those using drupal and worthy of their time. The only siginifcant problem I've come across with Drupal is that deleting content and/or users is like trying to navigate a minefield while riding a pogo stick. One false move and you can end up with orphaned content that is impossible to remove via the Drupal admin control panel, and which then requires you to go and manually remove this data from the database. As Jeff Eaton pointed out for me (see link below), you *can* delete content sucessfully if you remember to delete a modules content prioir to removing the module. However, this could be very cumbersome if the module you are removing has several hundred nodes published under it, plus I think phonetically this process is destined to bring a lot of Drupal newcomers totally unstuck.
What to do with orphaned content and their comments/votes:
http://drupal.org/node/21923
Deleting users it seems is less like navigating a minefield on a pogo stick, but rather using an actual mine as your pogo stick (i.e. total suicide mission). From what I've been able to gather there is no way to sort/group content by author name to be able to delete or change the author of content by a user en masse. The result this has is when you delete a user, then all the content they've created is replaced with an "N/A" error message. From here the only way to delete/modify the author of all content by that user is to write yourself an SQL query to execute directly against your database. I know the site maintainer's guide (see below) strongly recommends blocking users rather than deleting them, but my question is that as deleting a user in Drupal is so destructive why is the option there in the first place? If the delete user option absolutely must be there, then shouldn't the warning screen at least make the user aware of what will happen if they proceed rather than just saying the action can't be reversed?
Site maintainer's guide:
http://drupal.org/node/21923
Anyway, that is just my 2c about my Drupal experience to date. Other than this I think Drupal is head and shoulders above any other CMS offering out there in the open source arena.
Comments
First link should be:
http://drupal.org/node/53301
I agree
I found myself in a situation recently where I deleted a user and all of that user's content became N/A. I'm still trying to figure out how to fix the problem. I need the content back. Is it gone forever, or is it there and just needs to be rescued some how? I deleted the user because there appeared to be a problem with the user's login permissions, but it turned out to be a network related problem.
I do recall seeing the message "if you delete this user it will delete the users content" or something to that effect. I admit to ignoring it. I think I ignored it because my mind, on some level, just couldn't comprehend how something so stupid could be default behaviour. My mistake.
In the case of a site with multiple maintainers where the author of the item doesn't matter one bit, what good is such a tight relationship between user and content? In my mind this is a serious flaw and needs to be rectified.
I want to be a farmer.
I'm wondering how these
I'm wondering how these problems have been addressed? I believe the current version is 6.4.
Jere
post out of date
Usability dead forum post pruning
1) This forum is no longer actively used. Please do not post in this forum, it will help us to keep the usability issues clear. Thank you for your help!
2) This is a feature or support request or other not related to Drupal usability. (actually this post is out of date)
Please see the appropriate issue queue http://drupal.org/project/issues or group on http://groups.drupal.org
If this had been a suggestion for usability improvements , I would have added and issue and posted the link here.