Since listening to Garrett Coakley speak at the first Geek Night on the topic of Drupal, I’ve been sniffing round that open-source CMS. He kindly came to speak to us again, and very inspiring it was too. We’re now having a deeper look at it, seeing what it can do, what are its strengths and weaknesses; that sort of thing.
There’s a long (and old) thread about Drupal logins not working. A lot of the problems are to do with weird PHP version changes; some of them are caused by cookie persistence; but the one we’ve had was the result of losing the login box on the front page.
Assaf writes about, among other things, REST as a simplifier of development against an existing system:
REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.
Recently at Torchbox we’ve been looking into how to build extra functionality on top of Drupal users. The standard Drupal user object is a combination of the contents from the users table, plus any properties provided by the core profile module. This means that the Drupal user is a combination of rows (and admittedly deserialized, structured data) from a couple of tables in a relational database.
Drupal's Form API handles so much work for you that you'd be a fool not to use it as much as possible.
Nearly a year ago I broke down user_load() and user_save() in Drupal 5. I had to put together workflows for a number of jobs, specifically integrating the creation, instantiation and updating of users with an external system. Fast forward nearly twelve months, and we have to do it all over again for D6, for different work.
Wow. Well, now it's out in the open and I can tell you all. Oxford Geek Night 13 on Wednesday 15 July will be co-sponsored by the Guardian Open Platform.
The Guardian's Open Platform and Datastore work has really put them at the forefront of modern media.