Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Problem/Motivation:
The current behviour of the new node form is, that whatever meta fieldset (formerly handled as vertical tabs) has a value, is kept open when you edit the node. This can get messy very quickly:
This holds true especially when there is not a lot of fields in the content edit part, since the optical balance then switches over to the meta side.
I know that the descriptions on the fieldset labels were removed and there were reasons.
So I guess the fieldsets are kept open to present the information to the user and get them notified that there are values set.
But I am doubtful that this is a good solution, as a lot of not-so useful information is presented and even takes precedence, especially with the menu settings.
Too much information is presented, which is not helping with clarity and focus on the current task.
It is part of a general issue that the two-column node form brings about: the meta column has a lot of weight and distracts from the actual content editing.
A few tweaks could improve this balance.
Proposed solution:
Find e better way to show if and which value a fieldset has when it is closed, or not show this information at all.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| open-meta-fieldsets-1.png | 114.9 KB | eigentor |
Comments
Comment #1
klonosPlease take a look at my reply over at #2009932-1: Implement accordion behavior for meta fieldsets on node form.
Bottom line is that there should either be a setting for this or a contrib module. Also, we should gather some actual data as to what people actually use/prefer before switching the default to be either what we have now or what you propose here instead.
Comment #10
longwaveI'm closing this as a duplicate of #2009932: Implement accordion behavior for meta fieldsets on node form as I don't think this adds anything on its own. There are also several other discussions about improving this form in the issue queue.