Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.I propose we remove the functionality to disable development modules from Admin Menu. 8.x-3.x and 7.x-3.x.
- I don't find it useful.
- It is easy for people to mistakenly click and break your site (since it is next to important links like cron and update.php), without any kind of confirmation process
- It is hard to keep managing the list of "Development" modules which increases the maintenance burden for a module already struggling for maintainers
- Individual sites may have different ideas on which modules are development and which are not. Admin menu should not be that arbitrary decider.
- This functionality is better suited for a separate module that could then provide links in admin_menu to do this.
- Functionality not backed by any kind of testing.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #4 | 2392519-disable-development-modules.patch | 6.66 KB | dave reid |
Comments
Comment #1
dave reidComment #2
dave reidComment #3
dave reidComment #4
dave reidComment #5
dave reidAnd this shows the functionality is also not backed by any kind of testing!
Comment #6
dave reidComment #7
rszrama commentedI second this motion. If it's to be kept, it should have a confirmation form with a list of all modules that are about to be disabled. Otherwise it's much too convenient to accidentally click... hypothetically speaking of course, as if you were a certain poster's customer who somehow had access to the item because said poster didn't know such a feature existed.
That said, I haven't tested yet but will do. Downloading for the airport. : D
Comment #8
rszrama commentedWell, it did the trick. ; )
Comment #9
ofry commentedTested in my dev environment. All working fine :)
Comment #11
dave reidCommitted to 7.x-3.x and 8.x-3.x.
Comment #13
dave reidComment #14
rszrama commentedWait, holy crap. Somehow I missed that Dave was maintaining this module now. I don't suppose you maintain Commerce too, by any chance? : P
Comment #15
dave reid@rszrama: Are you offering? :)
Comment #16
efruin commentedI actually use this functionality a lot on various sites I maintain as a quick way to turn off a lot of the UI modules and improve site performance, then turn them back on when I need to update a view or tweak a field. I suppose it's too late to vote against this proposal since it has already been proposed, implemented, tested by 2 people and then committed - all in under 4 days. Way to solicit feedback from the community/user base of this module.
Maybe you could make this a configurable option to either show or hide that menu item to prevent people from accidentally clicking on it.
As for pushing that functionality out into a separate module and letting that module put links into the admin menu - that sounds like a more reasonable way to remove the functionality from this module. That module could let site admins determine which modules to enable/disable in a config screen and then act on that. Perhaps you could spin off the functionality you've pulled out of the admin menu into a separate module and make that available before pulling this out. I'm very new to Drupal module development, so I wouldn't really know where to begin on doing this myself. However, it seems like you (Dave) are pretty much an expert at this kind of thing since you whipped this change out so fast, so maybe you could do it and then see how many people adopt the new module. Perhaps there are a lot of us out there that want that functionality that you don't find useful, and seeing how many sites use both could answer that question.
Just my thoughts...
Comment #17
efruin commentedLooks like there is another module out there that provides a way to disable developer modules, and choose which ones are considered "developer" modules. So, I guess that's a start. Of course, it looks to the admin menu for it's default set.
https://www.drupal.org/project/disable_dev
Comment #18
nevergoneRelated module: https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/nevergone/2354787
Comment #20
lmeurs commentedOther modules / methods:
Comment #21
doitDave commentedSorry for the late objection: I found that function quite useful and would have voted for turning it into a configurable option where the module list maintainment is left to the site builder.
Seeing this in the release notes made me even stop upgrading, since now I will first have to build a corresponding feature to achieve just this.
I know that "time for cleanup" feel, but sometimes one tends to be hasty with this - as also shows the issue thread lifetime. No offense, but I don't like this particular "improvement".
Just my 2 cents :)
Comment #22
ceceliasI only recently discovered this feature this month. I thought it was super neat and now it's gone. But rationale here makes sense. I'm down to do some work spinning out a module (if one with the same functionality doesn't already exist, in which case, I'm down to help).
Comment #23
qqboy commented@Helianthropy
DId you find some. here is a one:
https://www.drupal.org/project/disable_dev
Comment #24
joran lafleuriel commented@qqboy
I was using disable_dev https://www.drupal.org/project/disable_dev
on multiple drupal 7 instances
but now it seems no to be working anymore...