[development] Drupal as an API: where the value is ...

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Chris Johnson <cxjohnson at gmail.com>:

> On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 8:18 PM, Larry Garfield <larry at garfieldtech.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > I would phrase it differently; core is trending toward a more
>> engine-centric
>> > nature, with implementations built on top of it in contrib.
>
>
>> I am in the camp that core should be more about APIs, than ready to use
>> stuff. How
>> these APIs are used should be left for contrib.
>
>> Think about Views and CCK, and if they were in core: would they develop so
>> quickly with core being only committed to by a few people?
>
>
> I think I'm in agreement with Khalid.  I'd prefer to see Views and
> CCK, and the like, live outside of core.  Instead, core should evolve
> to support and enable most anything the Views and CCK developers might
> dream up if it looks extensible to other ideas and modules, but not
> actual provide the functionality.
>
> I definitely agree with the thinking that Drupal is a web application
> framework, and that is what makes it so powerful and popular.
>

I live in this camp as well.  I use Drupal as an API to feed the data 
to the CMS portions of Drupal.  However there are still ideas created 
in contributions that are better served from within the Drupal API 
framework; ahah_forms for example.  Not all content fits nicely in one 
blob node->message so others created CCK; I'm not sure I agree or 
disagree about its inbreeding into the core structure.  I lean toward 
agreeing that it should be a part of core perhaps pulling the 
node->message and node->teaser into CCK as field types.

Earnie -- http://for-my-kids.com/
-- http://give-me-an-offer.com/