dr:what
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Table of Contents
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
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
Themers
- Multiple themes
- Hierarchical templates
- RTL support
- Presupposed XHTML (until D7)
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)
dr/what.1283714414.txt.gz · Last modified: 2020/11/23 17:23 (external edit)