Ajax Modal Dialogs (Popup Module)

Could you be more specific about where you think the popups break user flow? The ALA article you point to is about undo, which is a great feature to have, but is much more ambitious that what I am proposing (you might want to check out Chad's work on a DeleteAPI) . What you might have missed about the screencast, is that what is being shown in the popup is exactly what you would see if you went to the next page. It's the same functionality, just keeping your current context intact.

With javascript off, the links take you to the next page, just like they would without the module installed.

It is neither thickbox, nor a thickbox clone. It's some custom jQuery code I put together to make popups, which is totally not rocket science. Please see my reply below re: my feelings about the current state of jQuery UI. It was not ready for a 1.0 release. We will just have to see what the future brings.

Have you tried out the jQuery UI dialog? The version released in 1.0 was seriously lame, and, more importantly, not modal. Hopefully it will improve with the 1.1 release, but I am not willing to wait. Also, it seems to me that the lesson of drag-and-drop in Drupal 6 is that the Drupal committers would rather have focused, Drupal specific js than try and accommodate more general libraries.

Your pagearray module is very slick. I didn't think it would be possible in Drupal 5. It is much easier to pull off this in D6, with the introduction of menu_execute_active_handler(). The part that was tricky was getting the response page after submitting the form to not be themed.

I will check out Ajax submit, but I have general doubts about the Javascript Tool model of putting so many module in one project.

Yeah, I can't wait for a Drupal 6 version of CCK so I can start testing out approaches. The one bit that is tricky about the use case you describe, is not losing work in the CCK form when the popup is submitted. Right now the workflow is to submit the form in the popup and then reload the entire originating page/form to show the new results. To do what you describe, we'll need to replace just part of the originating form, which is doable (and something I am interested in doing).

that might be a fun project. i make take a stab at it when i try out the module.

really cool would be to use garland's color module bit to make rounded corners the same colors as the theme. just saying... ;)

Aaron Winborn
Advomatic, Web Design for Progressive Advocacy, Grassroots Movements, and Really Cool Causes

My two reasons for putting the message in a popup are:

1) Unclear where to put it. The obvious place is the standard message area, but it might be scrolled out of view. That would be very confusing to have something fail, and to have to think to scroll up to the top of the page to find out why.

2) Accessibility. I know everyone think of Accessibility and Ajax as incompatible, but it turns out modern screen readers can handle it. But you have to be careful to keep the flow of information clear. This aspect needs more testing and more work (I know I need to prevent the tab/focus flow from moving out of the dialog, and I might need to do more to signal the screen reader that the elements behind the overlay are unavailable).

I would like to add a setting to select different ways of handling the messages. I have been thinking about offering a timed fade out - where the message starts in an opaque overlay, and then fades out and reappears in the normal message area (a complete accessibility no-no, but some people might prefer it). Actually, thinking this through as I type it, it would probably be a good idea to always put the message into the normal message area, no mater how else we handle it.

I am also thinking about having clicks on the normal, semi-transparent overlay trigger a cancel/close. I wonder if folk have done usability studies on that one.

Right, there is also the fact that if I want to put the messages into the "standard" place, it is a pain to target. In garland, the message are the sixth of nine possible children of the div with the class="left-corner", eight of which might or might not be there. And, of course, the messages don't have a single root element. In drupal_set_message(msg, type), each distinct type generates a separate div.

I can put together the logic to handle garland, but it's going to be tricky to deal with multiple themes.

Hopefully in Drupal 7 to get some more stable xhtml to target. Maybe something like: