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SchemaAPI and how it ties in to both CCK and Views is definitely an important issue. There's also the possibility of programmatically generating basic CRUD screens from SchemaAPI definitions; now that we can store table and column metadata, and are beginning to explore relationships, Ruby-esque auto-generation of CRUD scaffolding is within the realm of possibility.

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Next for Schema API is definitely relationships, from there we can have

common queries built automatically which will lead to data API instead of CCK... I've been holding off scheduling anything until I knew for sure I was going to make it to Barcelona. I wanted to create a session where we can brainstorm about both CCK contrib in 6.x and directions for CCK both in core and whatever is left in contrib in 7.x. It sounds like there are a number of people with some vision of where they see it going, but I'm not sure I understand what those visions are and I'd like to hear their ideas and have a chance to flesh them out. Plus I agree that data API is definitely a necessary step in the evolution, but I'm not sure that is the end game. That is CCK for developers, maybe, but the beauty of CCK is that it makes it possible for anyone, developer or not, to customize things. So even with data API we still need something that provides a nice end-user UI for creating and maintaining their fields and widgets and some sort of catalog of custom fields and widgets that are available. And we still need custom formatters and maybe things like a custom validation library. And we still need to figure out what data API will look like :) Anyway, I hope we can get anyone with ideas into a room for a good CCK brainstorming session at Barcelona. Once I'm sure I'll be able to get to Barcelona I'll add a session for this. (Or anyone else who is interested can certainly do it). Karen