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
I realize that as a feature request this will probably be marked as postponed, though you might classify this as a UX bug too.
Currently, most fields auto-inserts help text.
This is relatively helpful text, but should be configurable, or at least optional. Yet there doesn't appear to be any way to change or disable it in the field configuration or in the form display options.
Here's a use case: Site editors are editing a content type that has a field for a Facebook profile. Facebook profiles are obviously "external" links; they don't need to be told that. Now multiply that by, say, eight different social media profile fields. Having that unnecessary help text under every field looks pretty silly.
Proposed resolution
Option 1: Allow the help text to be changed, either through the field configuration or the form display settings.
Option 2: Allow the help text to be disabled, either through the field configuration or the form display settings.
Remaining tasks
TBD
User interface changes
TBD
API changes
TBD
Comments
Comment #1
rootworkRealized I should have put it in the issue template.
Comment #2
Mac_Weber CreditAttribution: Mac_Weber commentedTo be honest I don't think we need to change this behavior. Maybe just add help text to "Internal links only", too.
This a feature request, anyway. Then, postponing it as of the allowed beta changes https://www.drupal.org/contribute/core/beta-changes
Comment #3
rootworkIt seems like pretty confusing UI, especially given the lack of help text for "internal links only" (whereas there is help text for internal links if you select "both").
@Mac_Weber Why do you feel like there's no reason to a) give site builders a way to change this text, or b) give them a way to disable it? What other fields force-insert help text that can't be changed in this way?
Comment #4
Mac_Weber CreditAttribution: Mac_Weber commented@rootwork I agree we should add help for "internal links only" as we have for the other options. The way it is today it lacks consistency.
For the same reason I think we should not remove or add an option to not display the help. Drupal displays this kind of help text for all other fields. If we plan to change this behavior it has to be done against the whole system, not just the link module. Then, I'm moving this issue to the base system and opening a new one for the option "internal links only": #2474469: Add help text to the option "internal links only"
Comment #5
rootworkOK. I haven't run into other core fields that force-insert help text, other than file fields, but there's so much configuration and browser requirements with upload fields that sort of makes sense to me. Perhaps there are some that I've missed.
But I agree the main issue is consistency. And I agree that my feature request for making help text optional should be consistent across fields.
Comment #18
quietone CreditAttribution: quietone at PreviousNext commented