Change "View mode" to "Display mode"

Created on 13 September 2015, almost 9 years ago
Updated 13 June 2023, about 1 year ago

Problem/Motivation

"Display mode" versus "View mode". It's confusing to new (and experienced) uses to have two terms for the same thing, let's at least make the D8 user interface consistent and go with "Display mode". When configuring the field formatter for an entity reference field, the phrase "View mode" is used:

I realize that the phrase "view mode" is used extensively in the code base for variables and comments, but I think it is important that we stay consistent in the user interface. Since we now have "Structure | Display modes", it seems reasonable that we should stay consistent in the user interface.

Proposed resolution

Make "View mode" go away.

Remaining tasks

Search the code base, substitute "View mode" for "Display mode".

User interface changes

Just some minor text changes.

API changes

None.

Data model changes

None.

πŸ“Œ Task
Status

Needs work

Version

11.0 πŸ”₯

Component
UI textΒ  β†’

Last updated 4 days ago

No maintainer
Created by

πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States ultimike Florida, USA

Live updates comments and jobs are added and updated live.
  • Usability

    Makes Drupal easier to use. Preferred over UX, D7UX, etc.

Sign in to follow issues

Comments & Activities

Not all content is available!

It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.

  • πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States robbt

    I think that this could definitely be improved because using View Mode for content displays is easy to confuse with the Views module. It also makes it harder for people to find documentation for how to use custom view modes because of the language similarity in terms of search.

    On the main admin page we have Display modes
    Configure what displays are available for your content and forms.

    So we utilize the term content on the top link but inside it shows

    Form modes
    Manage custom form modes.

    View modes
    Manage custom view modes.

    Which requires a leap of logic to go from content to View Modes

    The more consistent terminology I'd suggest would be to change the language to
    Form Display modes - Manage custom form display modes
    and
    Content Display modes
    Manage custom display modes for content.

    The other issue is that if someone isn't completely familiar with Drupal there is no obvious way to utilize the display modes once they're created. Instead you have to know that you have to go to Admin -> Content Types -> Select a Content Type on the list -> Manage Fields then scroll to the Manage display tab or click the drop down and select Manage Display and then expand the Custom Display settings and you can get a checkbox for the various view modes.

    Then all the UI provides is an ability to select different fields that could be displayed and you still I would assume need to create a custom twig template for this view mode (or use a module like display mode) if you want to customize how it's displayed. As far as I can find there is no documentation for how to do this on Drupal.org -> https://www.drupal.org/docs/drupal-apis/entity-api/display-modes-view-mo... β†’

    Display and View are synonymous to someone who doesn't know Drupal where as View and Views are two core Drupal concepts and it is very easy for someone to get the two confused if they're searching documentation.

    There are very few Custom Form Display Modes whereas a lot of View Modes are provided by default.

    So I think that even as #18 suggests that there is a problem with showing Display Modes and then Form Display Modes and View Display Modes - just substituting either Content Display modes or just having the default Display Mode be content and then Form be a specialized type of Display mode does not seem like a problem to me.

    The biggest challenge at this point would be confusion from eliminating "view modes" and using "display modes" instead for existing developers but I think that lowering the cognitive load and overloading of the word view would be worth it.

Production build 0.69.0 2024