Usability of Node Selectors

The 'advanced' setting for the noderef field already allows to to display additional fields for candidates nodes. (Views module required)

You might even display a node's body or teaser, using the appropriate view field (probably only suitable for the autocomplete widget...) - this might require some theme / css tweaking for a correct display inside the autocompletion box, though...

A radio / checkbox widget does not seem appropriate when there is more than, say, 10-15 candidate nodes.

My vote on an checkboxes / radiobuttons option! Would increase user-friendliness - no control-clicking needed for starters...

Well, if someone comes up with a patch that implements a checkbox / radio widget AND behaves nicely when there is a great number of nodes, I'll be happy to commit it...

http://drupal.org/node/63825 has been marked duplicate of this

i agree that this would be a great option, a way to build a taxonomy structure without relying on select boxes. especially if we are leading our users through the submission of nodes.

this function is really only useful with a limited number of terms, maximums being maybe number of states in the us, or something like that (not that a select list wouldn't be more useful there)

but with small numbers of vocab terms in mind, is there a way to allow the cck field creator to select how many radio/checkboxes to allow in the form? have it as a separate selection in the field creation and set a hidden max at some number (50, 100)...this way limits the damage if somone links to a vocab with 1000's of terms.

in OG, i show radio buttons and checkboxes until i get a list with more than 20 items and then switch to a dropdown. works for me.

Though a new concept to CCK, the switching method does seem appealing.

I didn't have that in mind when I wrote this patch, but that could make a great addition in the future (and apply to all types, not just nodereference). This patch instead is intended to add consistency and improvements to the available default CCK widgets.

This patch provides two different widgets: the desired checkboxes/radios widget as well as a plain text widget. Plain text is simply a integer nid for the reference.

A similar patch could easily be ported to userreference also. Applies against 5.x.

How thoughtless of me! Credit for the Text Field widget portion goes to Eaton, as I directly pulled that code from his cck_extras.module in CVS.

I can´t make the patch work. I got the correct nodereference.module and patch it (both with cygwin and manually) but it didn´t work.

Does anyone have the module patched and working. Could you upload it please? Thanks a lot!

what do folks think of the "automatic switching" approach that mentioned above. OG uses it successfully. Use radios/checkboxes if less an x items, and use dropdown if more than that. I am willing to do a patch. This could be a new 'smart' widget or an enhancement to the existing select widget. feedback wanted.

Note that we already have the 'radios / checkboxes' widget in D6.
I guess I'd rather have the 'smart' behavior be an option of the 'checkboxes' widget ("switch to select list if more than (user input) choices"), with no input meaning 'never'.

I am not seeing checkboxes/radio widget for node reference module in D6. Is it a matter declaring a fapi element as available for node ref?

moshe: http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=127375 (this is post RC4).
I don't think I get your second sentence :-)

this patch updates the one at #10 against 5.x-1.x-dev(from 2005-11-05).

Blessings!

There are several modules that implement funkier widgets for noderef selection:

http://drupal.org/project/nodereference_asmselect
and I saw one that showed two select lists, for 'in' and 'out' and used JS buttons to pass items from one to the other (lost the link though...)

The D5 version is no longer being supported. Sorry.