[consulting] CiviCRM comments (Re: CiviCRM / Drupal integration expert)

[Michael Prasuhn]

On May 6, 2010, at 11:05 AM, Sami Khan wrote:

> Integrating Drupal into everything is a bad idea too... imo. Drupal is
> not a library.

No, but the things that make up Drupal, do make a library.

At least with Drupal 5 and probably 6 (7 may break this) you could extract most of the theme system to be used as an external library, and several years ago someone posted some code to this effect on the development list. The DBTNG database layer in Drupal 7 is almost 100% separated from Drupal as a piece of software. When I backported this to Drupal 6 I noticed that there are only about 10 lines of code to change to make it run on it's own. I suspect the FormsAPI could be similarly extracted. These three things represent almost the entirety of what developers will interact with when coding, and I suggest that it wouldn't be as hard as it sounds to make the switch. Drupal core may even get some nice patches out of this!

I am not making a suggestion that this is what *should* happen, just stating that from a technical standpoint, it's more possible than you think.

-Mike
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Michael Prasuhn
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