[development] RFC: Drupal pluggable systems

[Larry Garfield]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:41:11 +0200, Adrian Rossouw <adrian at bryght.com> wrote:
> 
> On 17 Jun 2008, at 7:16 AM, Larry Garfield wrote:
> 
>> Recently I've been talking up various ideas for pluggable subsystems
>> in Drupal
>> in IRC and the other usual haunts. Ideas have been percolating in my
>> head,
>> but so far I have been remiss in actually writing them down.
>> Yesterday,
>> however, I had an epiphany to solve the primary issue I was trying
>> to work
>> out, so I present a hopefully workable RFC (for real, not IETF
>> version) for
>> pluggable subsystems in Drupal.
> 
> I've always thought drupal needs the concept of libraries too.
> 
> ie: code that is just used when requested, no need to be enabled or
> anything.
> 
> My all time favorite thing in that post is putting a bunch of
> initialization data in an sqlite database,
> tho you have to be very careful about what sql queries you write then,
> as you won't be able to join
> between db engines.

The idea is it would be a clone; you'd write to the system and registry tables in the "default" target, then call db_replicate_table('default', 'config', 'system') (or something) and Drupal will clone the system table from the default target to the config target.  Then you run SELECT queries against the config target.  If you need to do fancier stuff, use the default target.  Using targets does require knowledge of how each target is designed to work.  

And please keep replies on the blog to avoid splitting the conversation. :-)

--Larry Garfield