[development] Getting both better internal and external APIs into Drupal 7

[Dmitri G]

Hello, list.
I saw Dries' blog post about the State of Drupal presentation, and I looked
through the presentation (for those of you who haven't seen this, it's at
http://buytaert.net/state-of-drupal-presentation-september-2007).


There is a list, titled "Drupal 7 killer release".
It contains 11 items, three of them developer items.
Two of them, #9 and #10, are about better APIs.
You might scream at me for this, but I think having better APIs would be
best solved by converting everything (users, comments, terms) to nodes.
However, nodes are too heavy.  They have a big hit on performance.
My proposed/ideal solution would be to make the node more light-weight.
Put fields (CCK-style) and access in it, and that's it (no title, body,
extra fieldsets).  Beyond that, each type can customize everything.
Furthermore, things like content types would be moved specifically into the
thing that used to be called nodes.

This requires putting CCK or something like CCK in core.  While these
together may be beyond the scope of a single release, they would bring more
power into Drupal, and bring uniformity with them.

Back to APIs.
To successfully implement them, nearly everything would need to turn into
fields.
That includes modules like event - it just needs to add fields to a node.

The import/export API only needs to deal with nodes fields (since everything
is made of nodes and fields), unlike the one done in SoC.
The web services need to do the same.
Only very complex data types/additions need to implement a hook_webservices
or hook_importexport (or maybe we can combine them).

Please respond with your criticisms!
dmitrig01
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