jabapyth, thx for this useful module!

I was wondering if you've thought of ways to extend moduleinfo's ability to provide information about modules that do NOT provide admin/settings or admin/help pages.

There are a lot of important modules that simply do not do this (i.e. poormanscron) and every time I have to change some setting on a module like that I have to hunt and peck around to find where those settings are located.

Or perhaps I'd like to add notes on that module because of various development related issues.

I was thinking that it might be helpful to add a text area option the user could turn on to allow "user notes" within each moduleinfo fieldset that shows up in the Description column for a particular module.

Additionally, the user could turn on moduleinfo fieldset on ALL modules - thus it would show up on ALL installed modules allowing the admin/developer to annotate any module that's installed.

Comments

jabapyth’s picture

That's an interesting suggestion. I think in my ideal world, moduleinfo would be folded into core, and there would be a standard method (probably the .info file) for developers to notify users of where to go to configure a given module.

Short of that, a user-filled info box seems like a useful stop-gap measure. I think it might be even more beneficial for you to convince the poormanscron people to organize their pages in a way that doesn't require you to hunt around ;)

Can you think of a situation where the need would be better filled by an annotation box than by a change to the module itself?

s4j4n’s picture

I agree that there should be a standard best-practice for developers to just provide settings location information and even a minimal admin help page.

Creating an admin help page is sooooo easy to do anyway. You just create this in your mymodule.module file...

function mymodule_help($path, $arg) {
  switch ($path) {
    case 'admin/help#mymodule':
      $output = '<p>'. t('The settings for myModule are here: etc. etc.') .'</p>';
      return $output;
  }
}

Good program code documentation is extremely important and I just see this kind of information showing up in the drupal modules page for drupal admins as an extension of that best practice.

I recently asked poormanscron developers to provide settings location information but I wasn't able to convince them: http://drupal.org/node/628652

Any ideas where we can bring this up to a larger audience for consideration?

not_Dries_Buytaert’s picture

+1: Please, allow entering links to the notes per module.

BTW: I love this module and agree with you all. IMO it is plain stupid that modules (of a modern professional IT-solution, like Drupal) do not require mandatory meta information, regarding which configuration forms they create and alter and where (local/ file and/ or remote/ online) documentation can be found. Such information could be generated, if Drupal would enforce one standard method of dealing with creating and altering configuration forms. It would make it much easier to create change logs too, as all changes in configuration forms can be listed automatically. Hm, I guess, I should wake up now. ;-)

lpalgarvio’s picture

try merging with this module ;)
http://drupal.org/project/module_supports

DrewMathers’s picture

Until there is a convention for encoding module configuration path data, maybe this information could be crowdsourced on a wiki page. The page would have a table with two columns: Module Name, Configuration Path. You could create a structured feed for the page with Views Data Source. ModuleInfo users could then download the data with Feeds and store it in a local table with Data

ro-no-lo’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

There is now a plugin system for the 7.x branch. Check it out.