[development] CCK status?

[Darrel O'Pry]

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 05:22 -0400, Jonathan Chaffer wrote:
> 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.

Hurray JonBob. 

If you can set the roadmap. I'm still happy to help. You have the most
solid overall vision of what cck should be at this juncture. 

I can help with any part you need. CCK is central to much of what I want
to do with drupal. Good documentation for where the development should
go, and setting up tasks on the project will help me focus my energy
where need be. My filesystem work should be coming to a near close this
weekend so I will have cycles open to work on starting next week.

.darrel.