Making Drupal smarter

One of the things I worked on for Drupal 5 was to make Drupal smarter about itself. For example, the new status report tells you about security or maintenance problems, and can alert you if you need to run update.php after updating a module. These warnings are also pushed out to the main administration page.

This is a significant improvement in usability, as we try to make site set up and maintenance as painless as possible. The user can focus on the things they care about. If there is something that needs the admin's attention, it is clearly indicated.

The inspiration for this came from OS X. There are some really great examples of this in both Apple and third-party applications.

For example, Mail.app automatically figures out if your mail server requires SSL or not: it simply tries both and sees which works when you set up the account. It happens transparently.

NewsFire does something similar. When you click the "Add feed" button, it automatically takes any URL on the clipboard, pings it and fetches the feed title (provided it points to a valid feed). All you need to do is press ok on the pre-filled form. If there is no URL on the clipboard, you get a blank form.

With our new _install and _enable hooks, and _requirements to examine the server environment, Drupal 5 modules have a lot of more opportunities to 'do the right thing' transparently.

We should encourage this practice as much as possible. Modules that require Drupal's configuration to match certain settings should make sure they are set correctly. If the setting is relatively benign and related to the module's purpose, it can be set automatically. Otherwise, it can be a requirement for the module to be installed/enabled.

We do need to walk a fine line between information overload and too much magic. But I think we've managed to do fine so far.