Drupal Questions and Answers
A few of these questions were answered (in bold, along with answer).
General
- mfcf-doc@lists
is where we're supposed to send requests for moderation.
Is that address also suitable for questions about Drupal
(such as those presented here),
or is there some other mail address
we should be mailing such questions to?
- The few answers I've received have been from the minutes of
the weekly Director's Meeting.
Is there a reason that questions to the Committee
aren't answered directly?
Drupal
- How does one search the internal site?
— My Workbench
now has an Internal Search
button.
- Drupal CSS has set:
q { quotes: none; }
,
which makes <q> tags useless.
Can we reenable <q> tags?
- I notice that UW and faculties like Science use:
<link rel="stylesheet" ... />
while Math uses:
<style ...>@import url(... </style>
Why did we choose to use this different method, which
some people recommend against [https://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/09/dont-use-import]?
- Drupal is big on configuring things like
Taxonomy
,
Content Types
, and Audience
.
Do we have a web page that describes these for our web pages?
- We can't print Drupal pages in a larger font.
This is a problem throughout UW, not specific to Math.
E.g. use Firefox to print the Science home page at 400% size
and it prints out very much smaller than normal.
Can we do anything about this?
Documentation standards
- Documentation Standards says
UWuserid
is the standard name
.
Can we expand that to clarify what it actually means?
— It now says use UWuserid
when referring to a typical userid, not userid
, yourname
, etc......
. (Yes, 6 dots.)
- I see many pages where the first letter of the first sentence of
each point is lower-case.
There's nothing in Documentation Standards
that says to do this.
— It now says do not capitalize first word in bullet items
.
- Why have we chosen a completely different style for Internal
than for all the other MFCF and Math web pages?
- The Drupal way is to create a
theme
for our internal pages.
It would do such things as automatically lower-casing the first
letter of each bullet item.
(E.g. li:first-letter {text-transform: lowercase;}
)
Why are we asking authors to spend many hours manually implementing
that specific style in every single page, rather than doing it only
once using style sheets?
- Documentation Standards says to use specific font styles rather
than using Drupal's style sheet to appropriately display things
that should be tagged as
<code>
,
<kbd>
, <samp>
, etc.
This goes completely against the fundamental spirit
of HTML itself,
not to mention deliberately going out of our way to make our pages
less accessible
.
Similarly, it says not to use HTML headers.
Can we change these rules to be less anti-HTML
and anti-accessibility?
- What would be really helpful is for a parallel
Rationale
page that explains the reasons for each of the choices made
in the Documentation Standards page.
With that information available,
I might not ask so many questions.
Could the Committee publish such a document?
- I have many other questions about the
Documentation Standards document.
Publishing pages
- Wayne has suggested automation to regularly produce such things as
lists of printers.
What is the procedure for publishing automated web pages?
- It would be good if we could have a tutorial about our web site.
E.g. start with a description of our Drupal choices for Taxonomy,
Content types, and Audience, and then explain how and why the theme
for internal pages is different from the others.
Can something like that be arranged?
- When we port a web page to Drupal,
it could have href links that will be, or eventually become,
broken, such as pages that have not yet been ported.
Since I don't know what new paths these target pages will be assigned,
I'm just leaving them as is for now, but is there something I should
be doing to mark these
<a>
tags
as needing eventual correction?
- I don't have permission to look at pages that are awaiting moderation,
something that would be very helpful for all of us.
E.g. at the very least, Robyn should be able to review what I've done
before I submit it for publication, as should Naji and Christopher.
There seems to be no purpose to hiding our work.
Can we arrange to make things more visible?
- We're supposed to notify
mfcf-doc@lists
whenever we submit a document for moderation.
There is already a list of more than 50 documents awaiting moderation,
so can't the Moderator(s) simply work through that list instead?
Published pages
- Some pages use
linux.math
to refer to the general.math
region.
Is that a policy change or a mistake?
Administration -> Accounts
has sections for Unix
and Linux
,
when what is really meant is
Xhiered Unix
and Stand-alone Unix
.
Can we correct these titles?- I see many pages are using hand-tailored formatting.
For instance, rather than using the
Numbered list
button to enter lists,
some people are manually entering the numbers.
Even within a single page, the manually created styles are
inconsistent.
E.g. Accounts-linux uses
1.
, 2.
, in one section,
and 1)
, 2)
in an other.
Such things hide the outline and structure of the document from
search engines, make it less accessible, and create an
inconsistent appearance among our documents.
How did pages like these get past the moderator?