Please. Hold on for a second. (was Re: [development] proposal fortheming nodes)

[Adrian Rossouw]

On 15 Dec 2005, at 7:17 PM, Adrian Rossouw wrote:

>
> On 15 Dec 2005, at 6:27 PM, Jeff Eaton wrote:
>> Would it be accurate to say that in the starry-eyed future of Drupal,
>> 'formapi' will really just be a subset of 'presentation api' or
>> something like that? A standard way of slinging around data such  
>> that it
>> can be edited, or rendered, or persisted, or validated, etc?
> Yes.

One of the other not known things about the forms api .. (although ..  
i am going
to refer to it by it's real name .. the view api) is that it also  
maps cleanly onto
xml.

It's a tree with properties and children.

Meaning we could very simply write an import / export routine for it,  
that
would give us the in roads into distributing CCK node types, (since  
you can
make a package out of a node type, and a package can depend on
all the modules it needs.)

Now the next thing that this means, is it makes it a lot simpler to  
write an
AJAX form designer.. since you design the element layout (the Model),
and then you edit the element placement (the View .. although i think
structure is more accurate.) and then it uses the theme api to render  
this
structure. or view. The Controller is the form _submit function, but  
it's also
optional.

Also, you should note that every block in a page can now be accessed  
separately
using the right xmlrpc call (if it's enabled of course), and you can  
refresh certain
blocks automatically, on a timer .. or assign it to an event (which  
could be a link
added into that block, or whenever the document changes.)

It should also make it easier to expose this interface to flash or  
xul, since it
can use xmlrpc on the back end and redraw the exact forms with the exact
validation you'd have on the normal drupal sites. You could even attach
ajax events to certain blocks, or just make them completely flash  
(think lazlo)

If we do use the model/structure/view approach , it would be a fsckload
simpler to just cache the models and structures, and in the case of  
high load sites,
these things are very good candidates for being stored in shared memory.

These are just some of the things possible with the forms api
and only some of those more related to this discussion, but hopefully
if we work together we can accomplish them.

--
Adrian Rossouw
Drupal developer and Bryght Guy
http://drupal.org | http://bryght.com