And now a word from one of the little people... :-) I have to largely agree with Ber here. A node is a "piece of stuff to which we can do things". We can organize them (taxonomy), we can restrict access to them (hook_per(), node_access_by_role, lots of others), what we can't easily do yet is link to them. But we should leverage that existing organizational power as much as possible. Really, what is a photo gallery but a bunch of "image stuff"s categorized (taxonomy) in some user-defined way? What is a music collection but a bunch of "audio stuff"s with extra metadata (taxonomy or tagging or whatever)? As I mentioned above, what's really missing is a way for nodes to relate to each other. Drupal is great at collecting nodes, not so great at tying them together nicely. <insert relationship module(s) here> (What follows is me thinking aloud. If it ends up being dumb, that's what I'll blame. <g>) I think some of this needs to be pushed down into the node module itself. For instance, hook_view() currently has only two "modes": teaser and not. If a node could define additional view modes, then an image node could specify "fullsize", "thumbnail", "resize1", "handheld-optimized", or whatnot. Then it could be accessed with: node/123/fullsize node/123/thumbnail etc. It would simply return the proper image, as mimetype image/whatever. A textual node could link to it as <img src="node/123/thumbnail" />, and all is well. That also allows all the existing permission restrictions to be applied. That textual node, then, could have viewtypes of normal (default), teaser, print, etc. Problem: I'm not sure how that would work with custom paths (url_alias). Hm, maybe that's not such a great idea. <goes back to watching the busy people debate> On Saturday 10 December 2005 02:53 am, Bèr Kessels wrote:
This is a point of endless discussion in Drupal.
In myworld a node is a "thing" where all sorts of data meet. The node is nothing more then an entity to bind that data and make it a "thing".
Unfortunately, in Drupal nodes are only used for content. For posts, to be more precisely. So over time drupaleers tend to think about a node as a post. Rather then the much more powerfull abstract "thing"it actually is.
So, in this a file would be nothing more then a "thing" of type "document", "image" etc.
Ber
On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 12:43:34PM -0500, Rowan Kerr wrote:
A brief thought: You could keep "nodes" and "files" separate...
Where nodes are any kind of actual content that is typed into the site And files are anything that is uploaded by the user
Then you'd have node types and file types.. that could decide just how to display different things.
nodes would be stuff like: blog, page, article, book page, etc... files would be stuff like: document, image, spreadsheet, movie, audio...
Because files that are uploaded, I would not really expect should be given a normal title, body, published/unpublished, etc... that nodes (actual _content_) would have. Really, node's don't have a filename, file size, mime type, filesystem path, etc...
Then you get into more of a document management system where things are clearly defined instead of combining content and external files under one container.
-Rowan
-- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson