====== What defines Drupal ? ======

Of course, Drupal has historically been about the community more than the software, but this is not the point. The question here is: what defines the Drupal experience technically, be it for developers, themers, or content authors.

==== Why ? ====

The goal here is to think what [[dr/drupyx|Drupyx]] should (or not) be. Similar previous attempts were designed differently:

  * Drupy 1 was designed as a line-per-line [[http://php2python.org|PHP-to-Python]] port of the under-development Drupal 7
  * Drupy 2 was designed as a rebuild of Drupal 7 main features on top of Django
  * The goal for Drupyx, besides improving the overall Python-fu at OSInet, is to provide a Drupal-like developer experience (DX), themer experience (TX), and admin experience (AX) on top of Python, without an additional framework layer

Drupy 1 shows how low-level porting has been a trap, and actively discourages from pursuing in the same vein without higher-level thoughts.

Discussion transferred to http://groups.drupal.org/node/108604
==== Developers ====

  * The hook mechanism. Refined from its inception to the generalizing categories of accumulators (hooks invokable via module_invoke_all) and alterators (hook_*_alter) while early/historical pseudo-hooks (hook_insert/update/delete...) 
  * The theme() mechanism, with its overlaid overrides, theme functions and templates
  * Render arrays, with their properties (#) and elements (no #)
  * Complete renouncement of basic PHP practice expected (forms, superglobals, sessions...)
  * Refusal to give in to the MVC for the benefit of practitioners with more academic training than experience
  * Storage
    * No ORM, but DB API virtualization
    * SQL mandatory (until D7), NoSQL available (D6 and later)
    * File management
  * No mandatory content relationships
    * Taxonomy
    * 9-level deep book structure
  * Content (until D6)
    * Everything rich is either a node, comment, or user account (until D6)
    * Every piece of rich content has a unique owner
    * Fieldable nodes (CCK) and accounts (Profile)
    * Terms and vocabularies are plain text
  * Content (D7 and later)
    * Everything is a fieldable entity
    * Yes, even fields, although it may not be implemented yet
    * Including user accounts
  * "Simpletest"
  * IRC #drupal, #drupal-dev: possibly the single most important developer feature
  * http://api.drupal.org: an always-up-to-date public API reference for anyone to use without having to set it up on their server

==== Themers ====

  * Multiple themes
  * Hierarchical templates
  * RTL support
  * Presupposed XHTML (until D7)
  * Blue :-) 

Something will have to give, here: Python seems to be unusable as a PHP-like templating language, thanks to its reliance on indentation.

==== Admins ====

  * Online configuration, without a separate CLI installer/manager (à la Django or Rails)
    * Drush does not count, being contrib an addon
  * Themable extensible query/report builder (Views)
  * IRC #drupal-support: possibly the single most important developer feature