Gabor Hojtsy wrote:
A follow up to this is an issue by dww: http://drupal.org/node/145164 Although he reaches the conclusion that we need a hook_variable() from another angle, the goal is the same after all. So people sympathizing / against the effort, please use that issue!
And now Jose A. Reyero is at it, and proposing a nice patch, which has good performance and development-friendliness implications, so I would encourage people to go and review the patch: http://drupal.org/node/145164#comment-250759 Performance improvements: - slightly less code to parse on each page view, as variable defaults are centralized - less t() calls to invoke, as not close to every variable_default() call requires calling that, it only needs to be invoked at most one time for a value - less data to load in and unserialize from variable cache, as default values are not saved - less updates / cache refreshed on variables table because if value is unchanged it is not updated in database - less variables stored because uninstalled modules get their variables uninstalled automatically Development convenience improvements: - no need to repeat variable defaults everytime - you get your variables removed on uninstall, no need to write code for that - because you provide a type for your variable in the variables hook, you have your common value types automatically validated (implemented for email addresses and numbers) PLUS this makes it a lot easier to provide user friendly localization or translation features for site settings. Gabor