On Nov 19, 2009, at 9:15 AM, Josh Miller wrote:

Is there anyone else worried that the Drupal folder structure encourages users to drop modules or themes into the wrong place? Wouldn't you like to have a folder structure that separates core from the rest of the customizable sites folder?

As this issue could blow up in the issue que (http://drupal.org/node/22336) perhaps a short discourse on the mailing list is in order. It's weird that we all care so much about coding standards and yet we let our folder structure look so thrown together.

Perhaps I'm wrong. I have feeling the real reason we are putting up with such a confusing structure is that moving files can introduce a big wtf and some might think we should leave it well enough alone. On the other hand, I believe it's broken and not at all grokable for 100% of the newbies.


I'm all for moving the core modules into /core/modules, themes into /core/themes (or anything equivalent) in D8.  It seems way too late for D7.

What we could do in the immediate is put a text file DONTTOUCH.txt or whatever in those folders, with instructions on what users should actually be doing.

On a related note, some modules encourage users to place custom code or plugin modules into [module folder]/modules, 
which is bad because they can easily be deleted when the main module is updated.  I think we should discourage this.

- Ken Winters