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dr:what

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 Drupyx should (or not) be. Similar previous attempts were designed differently:

  • Drupy 1 was designed as a line-per-line 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
dr/what.txt · Last modified: 2020/11/23 17:23 by 127.0.0.1