Separate 'Link Description' and 'View Mode' settings

Very simple.

Goto to "Structure | Content Types | Web Links | Manage Display", i.e. /admin/structure/types/manage/weblinks/display on your site and set the field 'Web Links' to hidden.

I just tested it. It works as expected.

Do you have any 'Custom display settings' on your site? Did you change the Standard Display settings? Or just 'Full text' and/or Teaser?

No, neither in the theme or the 'Web Links settings' page.

I mean on the 'Manage Display' page. At the end of this page is a link 'Custom display settings'. See also attached screen shot. Also on top of the 'Manage Display' page are tabs where you can setup different displays in Full or Teaser mode.

Have you tried to enable under "Custom display settings" also "Full content"?

OK.

I think it depends which component in Drupal renders the content of a node. When done by core the difference between full content and teaser is recognized correctly and the display settings are applied accordingly. It looks like that in Web Links a weblinks node on the Links page is always rendered like full content and the Web Links settings are just used internally to select how the description of a weblinks node should be displayed, i.e. full description, description truncated to teaser length or no description.

So I have to check if formatting of weblinks node on the Links page is not implemented as it should be done under D7.

I've just tested this (using the default Bartik theme) and it appears that neither the 'teaser' not 'full content' custom settings are respected when showing the main weblinks page. The link to the group is always rendered with the 'default' setting.

in "Custom Display Settings" only mark "Full Content" - not teaser. It fixed it then.
But what is the logic in that, make full content and display less?

@Pafla in #9 - when you tick the box for 'custom displays' that creates a new sub-tab where you can make further changes. What was the setting for weblnks in the 'full content' sub-tab? It might be that your theme (Mayo) does respect the setting, but my testing using Bartik did not. I'll might download Mayo and try it.

I've tested it with Pixture Reloaded and it behaves as described by Pafla.

I've tested on Mayo and my findings are the same as my comment in 11. On the main weblinks page the nodes are rendered with 'default'. I found a very good way to check this is to use 'tokenised text' and set a label for each. See screen shot. Then it is really clear. In the Maybe Pixture behaves differently?

I've done a full test of all the combinations, using the built-in Bartik and Garland themes and also Pixture Reloaded and Mayo. I used the trick of adding the display name into the tokeninsed label text for the link, to show clearly what display is rendering the content.

The settings I used in Manage display were :
default - link description set to default, both labels inline
full content - link description set to plain text, both labels above
teaser - link description set to summary of trimmed to 10, both labels hidden

Then in the 'Links settings' fieldset I tried each of the three options for Link description display

I'm not certain that we actually have a problem. If you still think there is an error, please point out which of the above cases is wrong, and we'll go from there.

[edited to fix a couple of errors in my typing, not the results]

Thanks for your extensive tests and detailed test report.

I don't see a problem neither.

To summarise my testing:

1. Mostly everything appears to be working ok
2. The 'no description' option affects the main links page and the group page, but not the full node (as expected)
3. There must be some other setting to turn off the description/body label, as it was showing before but now it is never shown in my test site
4. The links page is rendered by the default display when the link description display is 'none' or 'full length' but rendered by the teaser display if set to 'teaser' This will have other possibly adverse effects - the option only mentions how the description will be displayed. If we leave it like this, we should at least say something about the node rendering using this setting.
5. Maybe we should add a 'weblinks' render mode (as discussed elsewhere) and change the form to show all the actual render options available, not a radio with effectively just the three core values. This would allow site designers proper flexibility
6. The variable 'weblinks_linkdesc' which holds this value (currently none/teaser/body) is used in three places in weblinks.module - once in hook_weblinks_preprocess to derive a value for $variables['weblinks_body'] and in two calls to node_view($node, $linkdesc); when creating output for the main page, group page and user page

So it seems that this option is used for more than one purpose, and that could cause confusion (it certainly took me quite a while to get it sorted). Just opening the discussion here on the best way to proceed.

My notes.

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. I think in Manage Fields - Display Fields.
4. Correct.
5. An idea which can be discussed.

I discovered another issue: in blocks the setting "Show description" does not work as defined. "No" works. But "Teaser" not: even when selected the full description is shown in the block. Apart from the random block: there is the setting fully ignored. This block displays the links always with no description.

3. I found out why the label for the link description (body text) is not shown. It is because we render the weblinks body via the weblinks-link.tpl.php template, which does not display the label. The value of $variables['weblinks_body'] is set in weblinks_weblinks_preprocess() and other values from the weblinks table (link status, click count, etc) are also rendered here. All of this together is what gets displayed as 'Link Description' as referred to in the Content Type Manage Display tab.

4, 6. To solve these problems the best solution is to separate out the two settings, and not use one to control more things behind the scenes. Hence here is a patch which adds a new 'View Mode' selection in the admin settings form. This is then used in _weblinks_links() and _weblinks_user() instead of the original variable. It is now clear what the two settings do, and the admin can have better control over the display of links. The view mode values should be 'default', 'teaser' and 'full' but currently we call node_view($node, 'body') or node_view($node, 'none'). These probably revert to 'default' anyway, so having a separate setting is better.

5. On reflection, the admin can currently use 'Default', 'Teaser' and 'Full Content' view modes. I don't think we need to make another one, as these are already customisable per content-type. Site designers who need more than these can create one or more additional displays via a custom hook_entity_info_alter() and the code change I have made will automatically include them in the drop-down selection.

I discovered another issue ...

That's good, but this issue thread is complicated enough already, so maybe you could open another issue? Happy to look at that, but I think it should be a separate task. Hope that's ok with you?

Your proposed concept sounds good.

I have tested the patch and found one problem. When clicking on link at 'You can customise the display at ' a Page not found error ist displayed:

Page not found
The requested page "/cm7/en//admin/structure/types/manage/weblinks/display" could not be found.

OK, i will create a new issue for the blocks "Show description" settings problem.

Glad you like the proposal.

For the 'not found' page, on line 312 of weblinks.admin.inc I had an extra / at the start of the url, which is wrong, but my browsers (both Firefox and Chrome) allowed it, and displayed the correct page, so I did not notice the error.

array('@link' => url('/admin/structure/types/manage/weblinks/display'))),

should be

array('@link' => url('admin/structure/types/manage/weblinks/display'))),

Can you edit this in your source code? I have fixed the source but won't upload a new patch just for this one typo ;-)

Fixed the source. Tested and works.

Good stuff :-)