[development] FAPI's future

[Sean Robertson]

I'm all for that.  I like the way the theme hook works now.



Jeff Eaton wrote:
> 
> On Aug 8, 2007, at 4:06 PM, Peter Wolanin wrote:
> 
>> or simpler still require (or at least allow) $form['#title'] for each
>> form?  Or some similar top-level property?
>>
>> -Peter
> 
> This gets nasty very quickly. Retrieving one form, whose ID you know, 
> and displaying its human-readable title, is fine. But figuring out 
> whether there is another form, somewhere on your site, that you want to 
> perform the same operation on? That's nasty.
> 
> It's similar to the problem that we faced with theme functions in Drupal 
> 5: overriding a theme function was easy ... once you figured out it was 
> there. But figuring out *what theme functions existed for overriding* 
> was an exercise in using regexes. In the D6 theme system, we solved this 
> by creating a theme function registry. If you don't announce your 'foo' 
> theme function in hook_theme(), you can't call theme('foo'). That makes 
> the cached theme registry a reliable place to obtain information about 
> theme functions.
> 
> FormAPI, if it's to be used in the way that Dries seems to be talking 
> about, needs this sort of system. otherwise, we're stuck with 'cool 
> hacks,' like modules that hook_form_alter() everything while you browse 
> around the site, and save a list of all the Form IDs they see pass by. 
> That's way less than ideal.
> 
> --Jeff

-- 
Sean Robertson
Web Developer
NGP Software, Inc.
seanr at ngpsoftware.com
(202) 686-9330
http://www.ngpsoftware.com