[development] low hanging fruit for Drupal 6: variable defaults

[Konstantin Käfer]

> A possible solution could be to no longer support dynamic  
> variables.  In our running example, we'd then have to add a  
> 'something' field to the node_type database table.  However, for a  
> number of use-cases this might be impractical.  Then again, it  
> might also prevent that people abuse the variables table as an easy  
> storage system.

Where do we use dynamic variables in core except for the node type  
settings storage (which (hopefully) gets tackled in http://drupal.org/ 
node/111715).


>  1. For convenience, we want a central place to define a variable's  
> default value.
>
>  2. Out of necessity, we want a mechanism to let the locale system  
> translate variables that have dynamic content shown on the UIs  
> (i.e. the footer message).

1 is more or less a side effect of 2 and has not been the initial  
motivation.

Konstantin Käfer – http://kkaefer.com/