General discussion

could anyone point me to a document or resource that fully explains to me how taxonomy can help me in drupal and how best I can make it work? I am interested in a menu to grow and develop on its own based on how taxonomy is approached. I have been trying it on my site but the concept is still a bit beyond my grasp....:). Specifically, just what is meant by 'taxonomy'? I have installed a couple of modules but am looking for a detailed example of how it should be laid out. Thanks.

Consistency between browsers is always a hassle. I've always believed Java is evil. I use the latest Firefox because it has features IE doesn't have, namely a download manager and tabbed surfing. What is stopping me dead at the moment is the inability to paste into HTML-Area fields. I get a 'Mozilla' error (the full error appears on a pop-up, whose text I cannot copy - annoyingly). I'm directed to this site: http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/securityprefs.html - which is useless.

INTRO
-----
From me and some other users -and maybe many more potential users-, a key feature Drupal lacks is the ability to have content in multiple languages. There has been some tries to implement it as a separate module, but until now, it is not possible to achive it without some patching to the dabase and/or to the core. I think it is really an important feature and in fact, I've chosen Drupal for some of my developments because -besides the other features- the other open source CMSs I like -Xoops, Mambo...- don't implement it either. So it would be great to get it into the core, maybe for next version.

THE CURRENT APPROACH: i18n module
---------------------------------
Well, this module -which I contributed- really provides multi language, and also interface translation for anonymous users, but I have some problems with it:
- Requires important changes to the database, which cannot be easily undone.
- Requires -with latest Drupal version- some patches to the core.
- I has too many hacks to minimize the patches required that minimal changes to drupal core require continuous updating of the module.
- The content synchronization -nodes and taxonomy- between languages is something that works, but I don't really like how it is implemented because it is getting way too complex, and depends on individual modules implementation to work properly. Also, it is an 'all languages'/'single language' approach: either you have one node type translated for all languages or only a single language version.
- And, the main one, it is an all-or-nothing approach and way too impactant change to gradually find its way into the core.

THE FUTURE
----------
My plan is to redesign the whole thing with a completely different approach, which will make it possible to easily enable/disable it and also to be gradually implemented into the Drupal core. So this is the plan:

1. Add languages to nodes -which is a single field- and then create some patches for the node.module to select the appropiate node list in each case for each language.

2. Create a translation module which will be cleanly implemented and will keep only some list of 'which node is translation of which'

3. Add languages to taxonomy, which will probrably require separation of vocabularies and terms structural data -hierarchies, weights...- from language dependent content -names, descriptions- and some patches for the taxonomy module.

4. .... Well, first 1, 2 and 3, then we'll see

And,

 ...
foreach ($step_by_step_list as $patch) {
  while (!finds_its_way_into_the_core($patch)) {
    cry();
  }
}

Hope this complains with Drupal's coding standards ;-)

So... comments, better ideas, anyone ??

PS: Please don't tell me 'we dont need it, most of Drupal sites are single language'. Which is true but 'most of Drupal sites are single language' because Drupal is single language :-((

I'm trying to create a contact form (using the form_mail module) but it isn't working as expected. The page doesn't acknowledge the post and simply displays the main page.

In an effort to create the simplest form possible, I created a new "page" node in php mode and added the following code.

Apologies for dumbness but... I understood that 4.5 would include node-level permissions amongst other things. I've just installed CVS and can't find any such anywhere. I've trawled through the documentation, and it looks to me as if 4.5 in fact just includes a framework, and that in order to get the node-level permissions, I would in fact have to download and install node_perm module or some such. Please can someone help with three questions:
1) Is this indeed the case?
2) Will this still be the case when 4.5 is released?

Contributers to drupal might remember that last release the contribution module was cleaned up after a new release.

The plans are to do this again after the new 4.5 release. The last time there was some confusion about why and how this would be done so if you are a contribution maintainer, or are looking for a way to help Drupal, read this carefully.

Because we allow everyone with good modules or themes, to keep those in the contributions, these are not always up to date. After a new release, modules or themes are often not updated, simply because there is no-one to do so. This is confusing, people try to install old modules quite often, resulting in errors, or a non working site. Also, for a lot of people it is not clear that a module is not maintained, so they might not see that there is a great opportunity to help! And because Drupal does not work with backwards compatible releases, old modules will most certainly not work on a new release without modification. For content we do have backwards compatibility, of course.

Contributions will be removed if:

• they do not have a HEAD branch (i.e. those that are created for a single release only).
• they are more that two releases old
• they were not updated for two releases

Note that removing does not throw them away for good. They will still be accessible in the attic of the repository.