[development] Rename *_load and friends

[Darrel O'Pry]

On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 17:42 +0200, adrian rossouw wrote:
> On 07 Jan 2007, at 9:11 AM, Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> 
> >> I agree with James on this.  There's something elegantly simple about
> >> hook_something turns into module_something.
> >
> > Problem. hook_load does not turn into module_load any more. It's  
> > turned into whatever 'module' is defined in hook_node_info
> 
> Personally, I favour load_<something> (where something is either the  
> modulename, or modulename_thing).
> 
> This can be used in a function called drupal_load('something',  
> 'parameter', 'parameter'); (which works in almost exactly the same
> way we currently do theme functions), But you can also change the  
> functions, by changing the data definitions.
> 
> This would allow us to hook into the save / load of all our objects.  
> A simple example is finally
> introducing the top level object/ item type.
> 
> Every node/user/term/etc could insert a record into the items table.  
> And you could just use load('item', $item_id);
> to return the item. You could then relate items to each other,  
> instead of having to do the node / user / taxonomy / blah
> loading / saving / etc.
> 
> With these functions all being in this way, we can make sure the API  
> is consistent. All load functions must return the object,
> all update functions must take the object as a reference (for the  
> other modules to hook into). It's always annoyed me how
> node_save and user_save have different function definitions.

Then you could get silly and implement them as singleton's and add
memcached/someother cache support and get a form of persistent data
object in php for drupal.