[development] CCK status?

[Jonathan Chaffer]

Hi, all.

It goes without saying that I feel horrible about my lack of  
involvement with the project of late. I know that people have been  
depending on my work, and I haven't been able to provide it. I've  
been a bit confused about the direction of my professional life, and  
it has had a big impact on my motivation to do programming in my  
spare time. But that's a separate discussion...

I've resolved to give up some control in many areas of my life for my  
own health, and this is one of them. I asked tavon to do maintenance  
on the 4.7 branch of CCK, which helps a bit; I want to expand that  
with more committers now. At the moment I want people who are willing  
to review and commit bug fixes and hold off on the feature requests.  
Let me know if you're interested.

I'm thrilled that features of the CCK project are making their way  
into core. Thanks to Karoly and Neil especially in making this  
happen. There is now a big conflict between the contributed system  
and the core functions, though, that I need help in reconciling. It's  
not even possible to update a HEAD install right now if CCK is  
installed due to DB conflicts. I don't know where to go on this one.


Finally, a few bigger features I've been working on that there is no  
viable code for yet:

Configurable titles. We need a way for any combination of fields to  
be used as the title of a node. This helps to address the node  
reference problem of non-unique node titles, as well. Mostly I can't  
come up with a decent UI for this.

Validators. There is a pending patch for adding regexes to validate  
input. I'd really much rather get a general system in place, so that  
validation methods can be added on to a field flexibly, similar to  
how widgets are associated with fields now. This would allow us to  
add, say, an e-mail address validator to a text field, obviating the  
need for a whole separate e-mail address field type.

Formatters. In a similar vein, I'd like the presentation of data to  
be decoupled from the field type modules, so that they can be defined  
flexibly in additional modules. This is the other half of the e-mail  
address example; allowing for the address to be automatically linked.  
When this is implemented it can also be exposed to Views as the list  
of ways to display a field.

Tests. We are toying with test-driven development at my workplace,  
and I've been working with tavon on applying this to the CCK  
development. The biggest hurdle with accomplishing this with  
simpletest is getting the database back to a known state during the  
setup/teardown. I'm interested in any views on this topic.


Thanks for everyone's patience with me. I consider you all to be  
great friends, and apologize once again for being out of touch.

--
Jonathan Chaffer
Algorithm Alchemist, Structure Interactive
(616) 364-7423    http://www.structureinteractive.com/