Question from Pro Drupal 7 Book: Annotate module

Question

So this is likely a shot in the dark, but for anyone out there who knows a bit of Drupal and better yet has implemented the annotate module from Ch. 2 of Pro Drupal 7 Development

Do you know how to alter the annotate module so all users can annotate? Right now, only the admin can annotate and it's being presented as an extension to editing.

The specific code being used is in this repository (pretty much straight from the book): http://github.com/dsharkey/Drupal-Module-Development--Annotate-Module

Further, I'm not really seeing how the annotate module is told to be presented at all? I believe its by the following lines of PHP (from annotate.admin.inc):

$instance = array(
          'field_name' => 'annotation',
          'entity_type' => 'node',
          'bundle' => $key,
          'label' => t('Annotation'),
          'widget_type' => 'text_textarea_with_summary',
          'settings' => array('display_summary' => TRUE),
          'display' => array(
            'default' => array(
              'type' => 'text_default',
            ),
            'teaser' => array(
              'type' => 'text_summary_or_trimmed',
            ),
        ),
      );
$instance = field_create_instance($instance);

But I'm not sure how that does anything more than create an instance and attach itself to a node. Why does it display where it does (as an option next to edit)?

Thanks all!

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "as an option next to edit", but the code you uploaded (and double-checking the book itself, the code used) wouldn't cause that. In fact, you should just see a field below the body field when you edit a node with annotations enabled:

The reason it only shows up when you edit an existing node (and not when you create a new node) is related to your first question about it not letting all users annotate the node: in the hook_node_load() implementation, it specifically checks to see if the user editing the node is the same as the owner of the node; if it isn't, it hides the annotation field:

/**
* Implements hook_node_load()
*/
function annotate_node_load($nodes, $types) {
  global $user;
  // Check to see if the person viewing the node is the author. If not then
  // hide the annotation.
  foreach ($nodes as $node) {
    if ($user->uid != $node->uid) {
      unset($node->annotation);
    }
  }
}

So the only person who should ever see the annotate field is the owner. If you want to allow anyone with edit access annotate the node, remove that function.

As for allowing anyone to make annotations to the node as a separate function to editing the node itself, that's not what the example was about and is entirely separate from the code used. You'll have to seek elsewhere for that and look at examples like the Drupal.org project Annotate for ways to do it. Basically, the annotations would be their own separate entities that would reference the node, much in the same way comments work.

But if I may be so bold, you've run into a big problem with Pro Drupal 7 Development in that it's not as good a reference for development as the previous editions were: it doesn't explain things very well, spends too much time on minor things and not enough time on really major things, introduces really bad practices (including several in the annotate example), and completely misses large sections of what Drupal 7 introduced. I'd recommend checking out Drupal 7 Module Development instead.