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Today I found an article about password usability, which suggested that showing users what they type for their passwords is an improvement to usability.

You can try a working demo, which adds a 'show password' checkbox.

This had me wondering whether this is a feature we should consider having in Drupal.

I duly began writing a small module to do this, but I'm stuck on rewriting the Javascript from the article as well-formed Drupal-friendly jQuery. Now I can make jQuery do fancy things like expand things you click on and whizz things around, and my code so far replaces the password element with the new one, but making that new element itself clickable has me stumped: it's all a bit too meta.

I know when I'm beaten, so I'm blogging this to say: is there a jQuery whizz out there who would care to lend a hand? If so, please comment or email me, and let's make a new contrib module for this!

Basically, an initial patch went in, we opened followup issues for cleanup, the followup issues never got followed up, so what's in HEAD is a bit of a mess. — catch, in a recent issue comment

This happens far too often. I'm not linking to the specific issue in the Drupal 7 queue because I don't want to point fingers; this suffices to exemplify my point.

I wasn't anywhere near the sausage factory back when Drupal 6 was coming out, so I've no idea if this is a problem that's getting worse, but I feel this is a problem that happens a lot, and that it needs to happen a lot less.

I think that our move to distributed version control may help, as we can leave new developments on a branch until everything is cleaned up (and documented!), but as everyone knows, technological solutions are no substitute for good communication and organization.

Ultimately, we need people to take on the roles of roadmappers and project managers.

This is apparently a dirty word; there is a widespread notion that you can't organize volunteers. I can with confidence state that this is utter rubbish, because I've done it, and volunteer organizations around the world do it.

It's maybe harder because it's online rather than face to face (we do it fairly well at code sprints, after all), and maybe harder because we're mostly a bunch of fairly headstrong smart people who are used to managing our own activities (which is one of the things that makes us good programmers). But we clearly recognize the need to be organized on a smaller scale, and the need to work with rules. Managing Core is going to be a mammoth task, of which we are right to be apprehensive, but is it so different to what we already do?

Regardless, it is necessary, and I think we are also of necessity often pragmatists. This is one occasion we need to recognize the need for some medicine that in some cases might not be entirely to our palate.

Spoonful of sugar anyone?

I am now batting nodes, complete with imagefield, between separate instances of Drupal with merriment and glee. For yes, I do have a working beta of Content distribution.

I'm about to quickly write a service to get CCK's content_fields() array from the remote, distributing site, so that the retrieving site can show a UI of possible values for a Views nodereference argument. Try it. It all makes sense once you do.

But I remember a couple of months ago, when Services was a total mystery to me. I installed it, knowing that this was what I needed to achieve this task, but I was baffled by it. What was a Service? And how come I needed a server as well? Surely a service is a kind of server? Argh! And so on.

The penny dropped a few weeks ago, when I suddenly realized that a service is really just another kind of hook_menu() item.

Consider: in hook_menu(), you define which function Drupal should call when it gets an HTTP request at a certain path, say, 'node/1'. And in hook_service(), you define which function Drupal should call when it gets a service method request, in this case via XMLRPC (which is still black magic to me, but with Services module, I don't need to know, because it Just Works). For that matter, in Drush's hook_drush_command(), you define... etc etc. They are all the same!

This has me wondering whether for Drupal 8 we should abstract this out to a general hook_callback(), where we define what function Drupal should call when it receives any kind of external input.

I used to write on Wikipedia, years ago when it was a wild frontier, we had barely 30 thousand articles, and not even my geek friends had heard of it from a source other than my blathering on about it.

It was quick and simple, deserving the origin of its name [1]. And it was quick not just to edit the content of pages, but their place in hierarchies and their order within lists. A whole section of the site that wasn't to our liking could be rejigged in a handful of browser tabs. Pages didn't belong to anyone, but the edit history and the attached talk pages gave you a clue of who was involved, and once you'd made edits to a page you could spot it in the Recent Changes list or your personal watchlist of bookmarks.

Now over to Drupal handbooks, where I find the process slow and laborious and confusing. I ask myself (and you!) — why?

We have Recent Changes of a sort: the tracker; we even have a tracker just for documentation changes, but I forget it exists because it's tucked down at the bottom of the site blocks. We have page revisions and diffs of pages, just like Wikipedia.

The differences I can see are:

1. HTML is slower. I know purists dislike wiki markup, but it's undeniably quicker to type ''italic'' and [[clean URLs]] than to muck around with opening and closing tags and finding the right URL. Granted, there is no one standard (though I would say that used at UseMod comes close) and Wikipedia has now bloated it so much with complex syntax to create all manner of things. But the handful of basic wiki syntax elements are good.

2. Structure is divorced from content. It's very handy the way Book module builds menus and trees for you. But it makes moving a page to another part of a book feel like a big destructive (and irreversible?) act. Furthermore, only a small number of admins can change the order of child pages, something which frequently makes all the difference between a clear read and a mess. On wiki, structure ''is'' content (italics, remember?): you want to make a list of child pages? You write a bullet list of page names. You want to move a page to a different part of the hierarchy? You just find what links to it and edit. Granted, this can often lead to an almighty tangled mess; not for nothing it is the full term a 'wiki-wiki-web' — not a tree.

3. Every article has an associated talk page. One day you find a section has all been changed and you're confused as to why? Find the answer in the talk page. You're pondering a big reorganization yourself, and you want to make sure other writers who are interested in this page get wind of it and have a chance to discuss it? The talk page. It's a bit more anarchic to what we're used to on drupal.org, but it keeps the discussion and the document side by side. I'm only an occasional participant in the documentation team, I'm not on the mailing list[2] and so I often find ''everything'' has been turned upside down and I can't fathom why, and I can't tell if it's work in progress that I should help with or just an almighty mess. Talk pages aren't perfect, and it's hard to follow discussions spread across many places, or even to know if you might be missing something. But there is an immediacy about the 'talk' tab at the top of a page.

4. Lastly, on Wikipedia it felt like there was a collective ownership of pages and sections. On drupal.org, I feel I'm treading on toes if I make too many changes. I don't know why that is; maybe we don't have the critical mass of documentation editors to turn into a community.

In conclusion: I don't have answers. I know that editing and more to the point, organizing our documentation is a big job, and I think the tools are not quite up to the job. As a first step, we should make book hierarchy editable by the documentation team. After that, start upon the inevitable debate about wiki syntax, and think about ways to better tie isues to the documentation pages they are about.

Footnotes:

[1] 'wiki' meaning 'quick' in Hawaiian, coined by Ward Cunningham for the original wiki.
[2] I hate mailing lists. Don't get me started on them. The 1980s called: they want their communication technology back is all I'm going to say.

I had a fun afternoon a few months back when all the imagecache images broke on a site I'd just taken live. I've just figured it out, so I'm telling you about it.

This was the situation:

• subsite.client.com was where I was developing the site, one of a family of multisites.
• subsite.com was a parked domain that went to just this site. It was this I'd just pointed to the IP of the box and that wasn't showing any images.

On the development domain, all worked fine. On the subsite domain, nothing.

The problem is that if you go to admin/settings/file-system you get a different thing depending on the domain! Each time, you get 'sites/CURRENT_DOMAIN/files', and the reason is this function:

So if the files directory has not been explicitly set and you're just relying on defaults, you're getting the wrong one.

I don't follow the internal workings of the file system or imagecache (or even symlinks which I consider dark magic on the commandline) to know if this breaking of imagecache is a bug or not.

But at least this is a ten-second fix on future sites. You'll find me here reading this post when I next have to set one up.