In this post, we describe some of the issues facing large or complex software projects using Drupal's CCK content type extension facilities. We then propose a remedy in the form of CoCKTaiL, a high-level language for CCK types and associated UI elements and relations. Tools and potential applications will be described in future work.
IntroductionDrupal's Content Construction Kit (CCK) is a powerful feature, much loved by Drupal developers, who use it to rapidly define data types and relations for applications. Using a UI, developers can easily create new content types by specifying fields, UI widgets, relations, and more.
The ability to interactively create new types and supporting UI's is a great timesaver in the early stages of many Drupal development projects.
For larger projects, however, the nature of the design and implementation process for CCK types leads to difficulties in evolving and maintaining projects which include CCK components, and these difficulties contribute to the lifecycle cost of large Drupal applications.
I will soon (hopefully within the next 2-4 weeks) be releasing Kupo. This will be my first publicly available Drupal theme via drupal.org.
I know that testing of Drupal themes and modules is generally an iterative process which happens once the theme or module is available for download, but thought that it made sense to catch any blatantly obvious problems before an initial release.
So, please feel free to click around the new theme and let me know what you think and/or find.
Trellon is one of the sponsors of the third annual DrupalCamp Toronto, which will take place on May 23rd and May 24th at the Faculty of Information Studies on the University of Toronto campus (map).
This is the project space for the enhancements that will be made to the Drupal core search engine's scoring and ranking capabilities. This project is funded by the Google 2008 Summer of Code Program (Thanks Google!).
You can follow this projec'ts wiki here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10906
All of the issues that get tracked and worked will be contributed for download in this project. Many of the files will be patches that will add features or fix bugs in core search or other contributed modules which interact with search.
Live from the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's News Challenge announcements looked a little like the Drupal show. It may not be millions of dollars, but millions more people are likely to be using new local, cutting edge community news Drupal sites within a couple years.
Among the winners:
Other projects may well use Drupal, and they are all amazingly awesome in any case. The caliber of people this round may be indicated by another winner, with Martin Moore, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who uses Drupal to blog. And he did some other thing about inventing the World Wide Web.
