Improve the reordering and reparenting UI if any term has a multiple hierarchy

Confirmed. I was able to replicate this issue on Drupal 7.20.

This also breaks the ability to sort the list of terms via drag & drop for some reason. You can't reorder terms when one of your terms has two parents.

I made a patch for this since it's unclear what the reasoning behind the < 2 code is on the hierarchy.

I have this issue and tested the patch on a long (multiple page) hierachical taxonomy list.

The buttons re-appeared, but saving the page throws a fatal error:

PDOException: SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry '5696-5538' for key 'PRIMARY': UPDATE {taxonomy_term_hierarchy} SET parent=:db_update_placeholder_0 WHERE (tid = :db_condition_placeholder_0) ; Array ( [:db_update_placeholder_0] => 5538 [:db_condition_placeholder_0] => 5696 ) in taxonomy_overview_terms_submit() (regel 522 van /Users/albert/Sites/drupal7/modules/taxonomy/taxonomy.admin.inc).

I'm not entirely sure if this is caused by the patch (I can't save it without the patch so difficult to test)

Guys same problem here. Changed priority to major because I can't change terms order anymore...
I applied the patch but got same error of #6 when saving.

changed to 7.22

Could this be theme related? It looks like your on Seven?

was this ever fixed?

On D8 the UI seems broken anyway, but this aspect still applies.
We could say "By design", but then it could still be improved or at least explained by a status message.
So moving to D8, our current dev branch.

Probably should be backported.

Thanks for the cool sketch of your idea!

What I intuitively like about it is the CTRL + drag'n'drop feature that matches how items are copied in most file browsers and many other OS interfaces.
Some might say however that should only be used for copying items and we're basically creating something like a new instance of the child term. CTRL+SHIFT might be an alternative as it's being used for creating links which more closely matches what we're doing here.
However, I'm not sure our current tabledrag supprots this or can be easily tweaked. There's been some moves to #1524414: Rewrite tabledrag.js to use jQuery UI but that seemingly didn't work out well. We'd need to see how it can be made possible.

The "release other parents" link however is unintuitive and very much irritating. Why would you click on some button in one row to make things change in other rows? Rather we should support dragging the "instance" out of the table to remove it from a parent.

And the "multi parented" indicator isn't so nice either. We might want to add "(parent: Parent B)" to it.
Also, not all multi-parented terms should be colored. If you have several of them, this would make it harder to grasp, not easier. We should better only highlight other instances of the same term if one instance is hovered or even grabbed.

Otherwise this UI-wise looks like a major improvement, given we can make it work.

But first of all let me get the basics:

1. It seems that currently in D8 the whole help system doesn't work. I'm enabling the help module and no help text is displayed. Can you reproduce this?
2. Apart from that we shouldn't rely on the help system, but throw a message after one term has been multiparented. Alternatively, we might want to reintroduce the confirmation form that according to #1197240: Editing Vocabulary changes a Multiple Hierarchy Term list to be marked as a Flat list must have existed until D6. Both improvements would be backportable, while your larger improvement would be D8-only, if at all. Thoughts?

still think we need to provide a way to remove from that single parent, and also to make the term attached only to a chosen parent in an easy way.

This would be just to make it even easier, right? I think we shouldn't do that anyway. It seems like an edge case. Also, even if other instances are highlighted, there might be more of them on the next pages, so more instances might be removed than the user knew about. Also, for single click operations, we have to provide a confirmation message. It would be much easier in this case to go to the edit page and reparent the term.
For quick, minor changes the visual support would be nice, however.

Imagine a term with 3 or more parents... we don't want all the names there.

Not a problem. My proposal was:

Green
-- Tree (Green)
-- Leaf
Large
-- Skyscraper
-- Tree (Large)
Old
-- Turtle

It scales up to any number of parents. That way, when dragging an instance somewhere else, the user would also know where the item was dragged from:

Green
-- Tree (Green)
-- Leaf
Large
-- Skyscraper ____
Old               |
-- Tree (Large) <-'
-- Turtle

An intuitive visual indicator would probably be even nicer, but shouldn't hold us up to much at this point.

Central question is: can we do it with current tabledrag.js, or what would we have to do to make it work. I'm not sure I will find time to figure this out in the next days, but if you'd find out something that'd be nice, and otherwise just ping me, so this doesn't get lost somewhere in the huge issue queue.
I can remember that some years ago I was unhappy with drag'n'drop being disabled here, so I'm really interested in getting this improved as much as possible.

I don't see any reason for using help. There are some instructions on this page already about dragging the items.

The existing instructions on the page are provided by the help module. But yes, as I said, we shouldn't rely on the help module being enabled.

We just need to add this part of dragging with multi-hierarchy.

"just" is good... ;)

In your example you are listing only the original parent and you are not displaying a "copy" of the term under the original parent.

??? No, I'm not.
Isn't it obvious that "Tree" is listed under both of its parent terms, "Green" and "Large". And after the latter instance gets dragged to "Old", it's displayed there.

Sorry if this sounds dense, but even if it is a graphical issue, is there a way to solve it currently without using the admin area? I have a giant list of terms with several parents. I'd like to be able to sort all those terms into 1 parent in Alphabetical order. I don't mind playing around with the code. I guess I'm just looking for a solution in the short term.

updated as of comment #20

This thread seems to be abandoned, but I'd like to resurrect it as the problem still exists. Was anyone able to find a solution/workaround for this?