Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
Sorry, coming in late catching up to Emails.
Regarding what Dries said, it seems we need a form registry whether mandatory (declaratory/explicit) or deduced (implicit).
We seem to already have one that Heine wrote, Form Store: http://drupal.org/project/form_store
There is also Form Corral http://drupal.org/project/formcorral
These may be good starting points ...
Anything that is after the fact will, IMO, not be nearly as useful. What we want, I believe, is to retool hook_form to work similarly to hook_theme. For that matter, I also had a patch that created a hook registry, which had some other really interesting effects, but I wasn't convinced there was a great deal of performance improvement there, so I didn't work on it aggressively. In fact, I did that prior to the theme registry, and decided there were massive benefits to the theme version; whereas the hook version had pretty minor benefits. Likewise, a form registry would allow us to do some pretty powerful things with forms. For example, automatic registration of theme functions for forms. Right now, I predict this is going to be a bit of an issue in Drupal 6, because all forms can have theme functions, but only theme functions that actually exist can be overridden easily. (It's possible to register them the hard way, it just takes more effort on the part of the themer). That's something that can be fixed a couple of ways, but registering forms is one way. It would also allow more advanced form browsing, opening the way for themers to use interactive tools to help with forms. That's a HUGE problem in Drupal right now; the form api is very, very powerful, and it's completely opaque to people whose primary skillset is HTML/CSS. This is something we should do very early for Drupal 7.