A time for Drupal Wishes

Submitted by Frederic Marand on
Grokking Drupal

The release of Drupal 5 today comes at a time of the year where one makes wishes, and obviously I wish the best for Drupal, be it for our new production workhorse Drupal 5, or its hardly conceived descendant Drupal 6.

So while there's still time for wishes in Drupal 6, here is a selection of three grand wishes :

  • the recurring comments-as-nodes, users-as-nodes, projects-followups-as-comments[-as-nodes] should iterate once more, combine with terms-as-nodes as in Category.module, and give us a unified model with unified hooks. After all, what's so different between loading a term, a user, or a node, when one forgets the code for a second and thinks of the grand schema of things ? Each of these is created is a CRUD object of a sort or another, and generic hooks could be used for creation(hook_insert), retrieved (hook_load), updated (hook_update), deleted (hook_delete), instead of having these hooks PLUS hook_user, and hook_taxonomy.
  • with larger Drupal sites becoming commonplace, logging becomes more important. A unified logging API could be created to unify the various logging bits like accesslog, watchdog, or the zeitgeist search log (OK, this was in my battle plan for 5.0, and I could never find the time to write it, but who knows...)
  • I finally manage to code something remotely useful for core. Or is that one really too far-fetched ?

Anonymous (not verified)

Sun, 2007-02-18 23:48

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I have two wishes for drupal, but I have not yet had time to play around with version 5, so they might be covered already.

My wishes are a bit simpler that in this blog (I think).

1. Metadata (at least in the front page) for core. I use nodewords and it is a great module, but something much more basic in core would go a long way to making drupal sites more easily found.

2. A link checker module or a link checker that could be an option as part of core. There are plenty of different ways of inputting links, but what I'm talking about is reducing link rot. Sort of a Xenu Link Sleuth for drupal that does not require you to download and use separate software. This would make those sites that used it more useful (less link-rot). Blogs probably would not use it much, whereas directories might.

Metadata and valid links are fairly important to many websites and I see them as two areas of potential development for drupal. Unfortunately I'm not a programmer or I'd do some work on them.

Well, regarding metadata, you really need to have them tailored per page if you want them to mean something. So the simplest choice is probably to:
  • write a small module that will use hook_form_alter to modifiy node_form so that it contains a field in which you can add whatever metadata you wish.
  • modify your theme file so that it outputs these additional data using drupal_set_header
That way every node page will have proper on-topic metadata. Now, regarding links checker, you can modify the 404 handling so that it sends you emails when incorrect URLs are used, returning you the target and referrers. That way, your users will do the work for you.

Regarding:

  1. Metadata, the module nodewords for drupal does this already and is pretty good. No extra module writing seems necessary. It is just something so fundamental that I think that it should be in core, and
  2. the link checker, the main thing that I think would be useful is checking links to other sites (although internal links are also an issue). External links are fundamental enough to websites that this could also be considered for core.

I know that I'm new to drupal, so I may be off base (and it might already be in drupal 5). Also I'm not very good at modifying themes in Drupal, but the only fix for that is practice.

Thanks for responding to my wishlist.