Node Form Columns mixes up the order of the original setup by default

Confirming this issue with Drupal Open Atrium https://community.openatrium.com/issues/node/811#comment-9110

Confirmed. It would be great if by default it didn't touch the setup of any existing content types.

You mean that Node Form Columns doesn't default to the CCK order but instead does something completely random and unexpectable?

Would be great if you instead of just confirming the symptoms also could elaborate on what the core issue to solve might be :)

When you enable the module it shifts the following fieldsets into the right hand column:

Menu settings
Authoring Information
Revisions information
Publishing options
URL path settings
Comment settings

Ideally when you enable the module it shouldn't move any fields/fieldsets into the right area. The default should be to keep everything in the main column and then let the user/admin move stuff as needed. This would be especially helpful when working on sites with a large amount of content types as then users wouldn't have to move all those fields back into the main column.

Then it's not a bug report - since that is a feature and it's not obvious that it's a bad one. I understand your side of it though - this might need some reconsideration.

My personal opinion is to let the user decide what to change rather than having defaults setup. This can be quite destructive if enabled on a production site (I know it's not ideal but some people don't have the luxury of dev/stage). Overall it's a really useful module.

On a tangent would you be interested in a patch for left column support?

digital006: I noticed weird behavior on a site in which i installed some Features modules, which included strongarm'ed nodeformscols variables.
Here's what happens: when the feature gets exported, it exports field weights for any exported fields, and the weights are all positive values.
When any new fields get added to the content type - either cck or other moduels - they get the default weight, 0.
This causes them to appear in the second position from the top, or some other random spot based on their order in cck ordering, which doesn't correspond to the actual values assigned by the content type's nodeformcols settings via strongarm.

So, there are a number of things that could be done to work around this issue.
One would be to have nodeformcols use negative values for field weights.
Then, when new fields come into the form, they sink down to the bottom.

A different approach would be to update nodeformcols so that if the fields setting (in variables or strongarm) doesn't contain entries for all the fields on the node form, then the setting simply isn't used to order the form at all.

Anyway, i'm not too familiar with the guts of nodeformcols or what these changes would imply, but I suspect that digital006 is having a similar issue.
Anyone using a distribution like Open Atrium or Drupal Commons would probably experience the same issue, since they're heavily features-based.

Updating all 6.x tickets as they are no longer supported. Feel free to re-open, I will commit any needed patches still.