Well, I am back and into the mix of PHP, Ruby and.... Perl? Hmm...well anyway the students are gone and there is just me and some rejects from various cms projects hanging around.
The downloads area is updated and now I will start filling it with some interesting items I have found. The first things will be a number of patches from Drupal [1] and Joomla that add really nice functionality. The idea here is to put them into a form that makes them easy to use. Joomla is not a problem but Drupals patches will require some massaging and some sort of system.
While doing a clean up of the Weblinks module to get it to look like the Classified Ads module and the Filestore2 module (soon to be renamed) I found myself wishing that the modules could share code without me adding into the core. So I added a folder and named it "components" so that the three modules could use its contents. I then sent an email to Nathan and asked that he take a look a compare the functions to Joomla version. This was just to see what I needed to work on. Nathan emailed me back in 20 seconds! Laughing he proceeded to tell me that everything was fine but why was I copying Joomla architecture? Yep, without knowing it I had created a skeleton of the Joomla Component->Module->bot scheme only in Drupal. I will have to look into this more because I have an idea that doing things this way would cut down on Drupal memory usage. Having only a single module load rather than five or ten is much better. Not quite sure on how to organize this but scratchpaper bits are coming together.
I have been spending the last day or so reading through Drupal code for the upcoming release of 4.7. I was trying to decide on if we should go directly to 4.7 or do 4.6 development and wait. My personal opinion is that 4.7 will not be very popular. It is way too complicated and does not use any php5. Too many small bits to put together to make a whole. Irritating changes like the formsAPI will lengthen testing and trial and error when developing. This post might start turning into a rant about Drupal so I will leave it at this... Some time in the near future might be easier to fork Drupal or start writing something from scratch.