Use this wiki to form up a feature list and for task planning. See discussion about this proposal.
Inspired by Taxonomy fields module.
Often it's hard to make an “universal” set of fields to describe some real-world object with single content type. Many fields in many cases will be empty or filled in by default. The alternative is to make a lot of “pre-defined” types, but there are no useful tools to organize them and associate with a custom logic.
Another task is to add some information about the real-world object that you already have described. Additional property description needs a new field for it's representation. If you haven't predict this situation from the very start and if your site is full of content, there is a problem – a new field will be added to all existing nodes of this type, even if there is only a single node where it's value is not empty or default.
You can decide to make a “special” content type with additional field and then convert existing node to this type by copy/paste it's content or via Node Convert module.
If this situation is familiar to you, if your real-world objects have a huge variety of types or different set of properties – you'll need this module.
Planned features:
- Organizes content types as tree-structured hierarchies.
- When a new subtype is created it inherits parent's set of fields and settings. Then those settings can be reconfigured, new fields can be added, existing fields can be removed.
- “Read only” fields are available for child types, values are set by parent type.
- New nodes are created as usual, types are selected from hierarchy.
- Existing nodes can traverse the content types' tree hierarchy with converting from one type to another (parent to children, child to parent, sibling to sibling).
- Each content type and subtype can be configured to limit availability of content types which it's nodes can be converted to.
- Node type conversion can be initiated manually or automatically (via action).
- When node type conversion is occurred in node edit page (manually selected from drop-down list or automatically triggered after form submission) new fields are appeared or old fields are lost by ajax/ahah, without page reload. No changes are saved before user confirmation. Custom messages can be configured to display the status of conversion. Warning messages are displayed when any data loss should occur by node saving.
- Automatic node type conversion can be postponed for administrator's approval.
- Node reference fields and taxonomy vocabulary settings page's “Content types” sections are grouped by hierarchies.
- Views filters are available for every parent types: “<type_name> and it's subtypes”.
It's only an idea of new module and no development started. I need your comments and wiki supplements. Thanks.