[development] archive module for core or not

[Gabor Hojtsy]

Hi,

As I have indicated, I taken care of updating and fine tuning the 
contrib archive module (originally by codemonkeyx) to work nicely with 
node access modules and timezones. Morbus Iff and Kazuo Oishi was of great 
help. This modules does not have a calendar block, but the date browsing 
is handled with an easier to use 'multilayer' interface.

   http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/archive/

Since we need to compute the timezone according to site/user settings, we 
need to deal with the date values of nodes in PHP (or if someone knows 
a better solution, please speak up). This means that the module is not 
terribly efficient, using 14 SQL queries to build up the browser 
interface. We can push this down to 3, but then one of them would 
select the dates for all nodes in a year, which might be big. We should 
talk about this, I have no hard data.

If core should have an archive module, then this should be reviewed and 
refined. I have added phpdoc comments, and tried to name every piece in 
the code sensibly, so that it is understandable. If an archive module is 
not needed in core, the current one could be removed, since there is a 
viable working alternative now. The current one, which has timezone and 
node access problems is not liked much in the development community, and 
Dries already indicated that it has no future in core.

The issue: http://drupal.org/node/29676

Gabor