[dev] Initial configuration setup suggestion

[Kevin Myer]

I'm not sure if my terminology is right, so bear with me :)  But having spent
the better part of the morning getting a HEAD checkout of Horde working at
home, and having seen the same questions about the same problems I ran into,
asked on the mailing lists in the past months, I have a suggestion, for a
possible solution, to ease setup.

The initial setup for Horde can be done through a GUI that pulls in information
from conf.xml and merges any values that are in conf.php.  Does the logic exist
in Horde to handle contingencies/dependencies/conditional cases for
configuration?

By that I mean if you setup a Database, say MySQL, can all other tabs that have
as a option a database backend (such as Datatree, Prefs, etc.) have the SQL
Database option be the default option?  So that in essence, if you configure at
most the General and Database tabs, everything else would default to using the
database?

In other words, if $conf['sql']['phptype'] has a value, set
$conf['datatree']['driver'] and $conf['prefs']['driver'] to 'sql', instead of
'none'.

I think the answer might be no, because the config is loaded into the GUI as-is,
and if you make a change in one part, there's no form submission when you go to
another tab, which could effect a change there.

But perhaps first-time configuration could be made a two part process:  setup
the General and Database information, submit, then use that information to
populate reasonable defaults for all the other tabs and don't display the other
tabs until General and Database have been configured.  Or, add a checkbox to
the Database tab, that says "Use this database for <insert configs that can use
a database backend here, such as datatree, prefs, etc.>".  If its checked, when
the form is submitted, the driver for datatree and prefs would be set to sql.

The assumption some may make (at least I did) is that if you configure Database,
Horde will use that for things like preferences and the datatree.  But truth
is, its really, configure a Database, then configure prefs and datatree to use
the Database.  Reality is, most people doing an inital setup are probably going
to configure general settings and database seetings and then try things out,
and tweak later.

This might help with reducing the number of "My install is always showing a
[insert default prefs.php value here]" (no preferences backend configured), or
"I can create a new [calendar,notepad,tasklist] but its not saved" (no datatree
backend configured) messages to the lists.

Kevin
-- 
Kevin M. Myer
Senior Systems Administrator
Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13  http://www.iu13.org