[drupal-devel] Standard set of objects and methods?

[Nedjo Rogers]

How can we improve parallelism between the various object types in 
Drupal?  Should we be providing a standard way to determine available 
object types?  Should we create common methods for all?

As object types, we have (at a minimum) nodes, vocabularies, terms, and 
users.  We might also consider, e.g., modules, themes, and file uploads 
as core object types.  In many cases we might wish to do parallel things 
with each object type (track it, display it, interact with it), but at 
present we need to do this somewhat differently for each.

Example 1: extended information.  We sometimes want to display 
additional information about an object being viewed (who created it, 
when, how often it has been viewed, etc.).  But we would need to do this 
differently for each object type (user, node, term, etc.), and some 
entirely lack methods.

Example 2: statistics.  We track statistics by node.  But what if we 
also want statistics on users, terms, etc.?  We'd need separate tables 
(term_statistics, user_statistics, etc.) and separate methods.

Example 3: associated images.  We want to associate images with objects. 
  For users we put a file reference in the user table field, for terms 
(via a contrib module) in a term_images table, for themes somewhere else.

Potential solution/approach: object abstraction.  Methods prepared to 
meet any kind of object.  And a way for object types to register 
themselves, so a list of available types can be accessed.

Would this make sense?