[consulting] State Of The Art

[Peter Brownell]

* Media 
My most recent project has required me to work with various forms of media.
Audio, Video, Flash, Image and PDF. Although there are a number of good
tools for managing the individual elements, I have not actually made proper
use of them because I needed a consistent interface. Unfortunately time
constraints meant that I just built a specific solution, but after reading
all the discussion around Acidfree and various other media attempts, I got
the feeling that some careful thinking still needed to be done about how
media is managed in general. 

* Ontologies
"Everything is a node". Except where it's not. The same project that needed
various forms of media also needed to link them together in various ways -
and then link them to users. If the CCK is actually able to take things to
the point where "Everything is a node", then the way in which nodes relate
to each other is extremely important. I'm going to have to do a bit of
research into the CCK and into RDF.  


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MAJOR DRUPAL THINK AREAS

* CCK
   * Sub-node structure
* Views
   * Multinode structure
* Configuration Management 
   * Install profiles 
   * Installation system
* []-to-[] relationships 
   * Ontologies
   * RDF
* Media Management
   * Consistent across media types 
   * node based storage
   * meta-data editing 
* Interoperable Node Access Systems
   * Possible layering of various node access modules 
* "AJAX"
* multi-site / cross-site / inter-site functionality
* remote connections/integration 
  * Asterisk integration
  * XML-RPC connections to custom services