[development] SoC 2007 Project Idea

[Kris Manohar]

Hello All,

My name is Kris Manohar. I am currently a first year student of the 
University of the West Indies. I am interested in the google summer of code 
but who isn't right? Well here is my two cents on an idea i have for SoC i 
would appreciate it you guys could give me some feedback on it.

Synopsis
========
Drupal does not natively support a hierechial container for nodes. The 
Drupal philosophy is about using categories and views for structuring 
content. While this flexible and dynamic approach is superior to the 
traditional folder paradigm, it makes operations that must be performed on 
group of nodes difficult. The debate about inclusion of such a hierachial 
container has been raging in the Drupal community for a long time.

Drupal already provides a rich set of functionality to select a set of nodes 
based on complex criteria, and to persist this set of nodes through the 
Views module. My proposal is a compromise between the paradigms of 
traditional folders and Drupal views. It is for a module to implement 
"writeable views". A writeable view is a traditional Drupal view which 
exposes its nodes for use in operations by any other module, as a single 
node. A writeable view is a standard content type whose instances are 
standard Drupal nodes. The implementation of standard Drupal node hooks by 
the writeable views module will allow Drupal core + modules to operate on a 
writeable view instance, which will result in the operation cascaded to all 
nodes defined in the view.

There will be no separate interface for creating writeable views. Writeable 
views begin life through the standard Views module. A writeable view is 
simply a standard Drupal content type which when instantiated is a link to 
the nodes returned by an existing Drupal view. Modifications to the 
writeable view node do not affect the standard view in any way. However, a 
writeable view is a standard node. Operations on this node like setting 
permissions, generic node properties, workflow state, or deletion, are 
implemented by the writeable view hooks to cascade operations to each node. 
The primary benefit of writeable views is that it preserves the Drupal way 
of categorizing content and at the same time provides the facility to treat 
a set of nodes as a whole.

Thanks much!
Kris Manohar

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