Stealing from the core and elsewhere
Mostly Irrelevant: MyselF
Development Director for Tag Creative Studio in Seattle
Tag works in all environments
Drupal has been used in our more standard web projects
Won the Best in Class Interactive Media Award for Arts/Culture website for Chihuly Garden and Glass
What are we stealing?
No actual stealing
Not completely original: Drupal is a large open source system that incorporates ideas from all over
Looking at patterns and architecture rather than actual code to copy
Not a full examination of sample topics. Just structure
Examples are shown in a non-PHP language to show extensibility
IMPETUS
Good code patterns are portable
Not everything is done in Drupal
Drupal is a great teacher with lots of documentation
Typically it exposes structures at the high level
Annoyance
Topics
Bootstrapping
Db Layer Abstraction
Weighting
Hook system
Dependencies (extended to Asynchronous)
Template system and Regioning
Themes
Generic Application Development
Portability
Scaling
Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY)
Set yourself up for success (SYUS)
Quick Theme Layer
Theme functions are just functions that take in data and spit out HTML
Theme functions are typically tree like - <ul>'s hand off <li> work to an <li> specific function
Theme functions can add baseline classes and other attributes
Bootstrap
Best definition: "Improves itself by its own efforts."
Drupal's case: initializes variables, designates handlers to the server, and including files for access to functions, classes and interfaces
Drupal has a tiered process
Why Bootstrap
Control: knowing when an environment is / should begin, resolves dependencies
Encapsulates variables/classes/functions based on the context booting, placing it all in an expected place
Allows for multiple levels of booting. Full vs. partial
Scale: larger systems develop, extend or add a level of boot without interfering with existing levels
DB Abstraction
Drupal runs all of its Db queries through its own interface
This interface is implemented into one of three standard Db classes
Queries are clear to implement, and handle validation/sanitation implicitly
Ever concerned about connection setup? Me neither.
DIY
Using JS, AJAX typically becomes the Db layer
For the moment, we'll ignore binding frameworks
Important to make it generic. But provide support for common actions.
Additional support for error handling, such as email alert, server log.
Weighting
Weighting is ubiquitous in Drupal
Most folks are exposed to weighting from the block system or possibly your own module development
Weighting is the order of rendering or module invoke, particularly useful in systematizing layout and resolving dependencies
Weighting is a simple numeric notation
Why Weighting
Makes order of initializing / rendering controlled rather than ad hoc or quasi-sequential
Weighting sets a convention or reference point for how booting / data gathering will run
Weighting is relative rather than well ordered. Pushing something to 1 doesn't require you push everything down
Hook System
Hooking is the process of allowing a function to tie into a particular thread
Drupal uses hook_menu format where "hook" is the name of your function "_menu" is the hook
Drupal has a ton of hooks at a lot of levels that allow alteration of data, theme, validation, and additional function fires
HOoks Applied
Our hooks will just be a straight name match
Hooks are about scale and customization
Hooks are also about not setting stuff up you don't need to
Dependencies
Explicit Requirement for initializing
May need a particular modules functions
Fail without crashing
Emphasizes the importance of explicit initializing
BUT we may be waiting on data processing or remote confirmation
Dependencies in Use
Each module declares their own dependencies
The list of invoke is swept and dependencies are slowly skimmed off
You have to avoid interrelated dependencies
Dependencies work with and around weighting
Regions
Hardcoded into the page and identified in the theme info
The Region is decoupled from its content
Allow for unlimited extension
Content within the region is also weighted.
Regions Come Alive
Fill a request to be added to a region within modules
Before display do a check on weighting to create order
Additionally, in this version we separate out template functions into module specific theme components
What do we have
Truly extensible system : any number of modules, regions, or content pieces
Arrangeable: template can be modified with messing with any other components (mostly)
Future Subjects
User system
Schema Generation
JavaScript Interaction Management
Validation
Pre and Post process Templates and Data management
CORey Kahler
Tag Creative Studio
Corey@tagcreativestudio.com
http://tagcreativestudio.com/drupal-summit
http://slid.es/coreytag/stealingfromcore
Stealing from the core and elsewhere
By coreytag
Stealing from the core and elsewhere
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