Groups admin: Updating a group entry with empty description throws an error message

[r-a-y]

If you're in the Groups admin dashboard and you want to edit a group's description to a blank string, on save, an error message is displayed.

However, if you wiped out the group description and you added a new member, the error message is still displayed, but the member is saved correctly.

This can cause confusion, so the attached patch allows groups_edit_base_group_details() to accept an empty group description so the error message will not be shown unnecessarily.

[boonebgorges]

Patch seems fine, but my conservative side is saying that this is not a regression in 2.1 or 2.0, so we should push to 2.2.

[r-a-y]

That's fine with me.

[DJPaul]

I have updated the patch so it applies, but upon testing, I don't think we should add this patch. Group Description, in the theme compat templates, is marked as a required field, and this change (obv) allows empty values.

[r-a-y]

Group Description, in the theme compat templates, is marked as a required field, and this change (obv) allows empty values.

Good catch. Would really be swell if we could switch to WP_Error for these types of things.

The alternative is changing the group edit template to remove the 'required' string, but that's probably a no-go.

So do we want to fix up the admin notice to be more specific? If so, 03.patch does this in a workaround manner in the admin area since we can't use WP_Error in groups_edit_base_group_details().

[DJPaul]

Looks good

[r-a-y]

In 9321:

Groups Admin: Add better contextual errors when editing a group.

Previously, when attempting to save an empty group title or description,
the error message was ambiguous, which could lead to confusing situations.

This commit addresses this (albeit in a workaround way - feel free to yell
at r-a-y for this one).

Fixes #5854.