When building something like a library (for which one must add possibly hundreds of containers), one wants the bulk of display and menu settings to be consistent, but that means going through and changing the settings for every single container and category.

It would be nice to be able to set a default settings, or to have a single control to allow containers and categories to inherit settings from their immediate parent, or both. Even better would be if the module automatically assigned to new containers/categories the same settings you applied to the last one made.

Comments

Jaza’s picture

Jaza commented

Interesting idea. The problem of default settings is one that I've been getting a bit concerned about lately. The solution that I had in mind was simply to change the default settings a bit, so that they fit the 'most common' configuration that most users will need. The problem with this, of course, is that it's impossible to reall know what the most common configuration is. :-p

In my first attempt at developing the category module (an attempt that never made it to the drupal contrib repository), I allowed for the default settings to all be configured on the 'admin -> settings -> category' page. The result of this was that the settings page was very confusing, and that the code for loading default values into form elements was very messy.

Maybe I should give this 'configurable default values' idea another try, but this time develop it as a separate module, and try to do it a bit more cleanly. What do you think? This would certainly solve your problems. I'm not too keen on either 'inherited' values, or on a 'remember my last configuration' system, but I think an interface for setting the default values would work.

robhamm’s picture

robhamm commented

Indeed, configurable defaults would rock. I'll volunteer to be a guinea pig.
:-D

As for the most common configuration, I would imagine it would be the way I have things set up to get the view at http://www.bookmuncher/library

That structure (click on a link and get a page o' links) is something I see people asking how to do now and then, and is the main reason I chose to use Catagory--because it's so easy to set up like that.

robhamm’s picture

robhamm commented

Sorry--that url should be http://www.bookmuncher.com/library