An incredibly common complaint about Drupal is in that its terminology is often arcane and difficult to understand. And while the substance of these complaints are actually right, many people come to what I consider the wrong conclusion, and it's this wrong conclusion that is actually the root of what is currently wrong with Drupal's use of terminology.

Let's take a look at some actual problems with terminology.

Taxonomy

Ahh, you gotta love IRC. Allow me to share a short edited snippet. IP addresses have been removed as well as some comments by people that are not really relevant to the conversation. The best part are the /whois results.

I'm not in any way upset about this. I think this is funny, and felt like sharing.


[20:01] *** kinesis (n=k@xx.xx.xx.xx) joined
[20:01] drupal vs joomla and why
[20:03] kinesis http://www.whitehouse.gov/
[20:03] This is an IRC chat, not google.
[20:03] thats nice

I spent about an hour and improved my old DHTML menu thing to make it much easier to simply drop in. It also uses better HTML.

It's still not perfect; the javascript is kind of crappy, and it hardcodes an onClick.

Still, it's a start. Maybe one of you fine js folk would like to rewrite this, now that it's more of a dropin.

So here's what you do: Take whichever version you need (there's one here for HEAD and one for 4.7) untar it, and drop it in your theme directory.

In your template.php add this:

I'm looking for someone with solid CSS skills and good photoshop skills and a strong understanding of modular design to help fix and create more style bases for Panels Stylizer. If you haven't seen it, the Stylizer lets you create re-usable styles for your panel panes and regions directly in the UI. Behind the scenes it will do image recoloring and slicing to get exactly what it needs, and cache those images in the files directory so they can be used. Right now I ship with a usable but not exactly perfectly rounded shadow box.

The last few weeks have seen an intense flurry of work on the Panels suite of modules. Today I've rolled releases of the Panels 3.7, CTools 1.7, Panels Everywhere 1.1 and a tiny bugfix release for Tinsel 1.1. This has created a massive chunk of new features that we're hoping will push Panels even more into the mainstream by seriously extending the power available to site builders, particularly in terms of giving site administrators better options for doing their jobs without having to worry about details they've taken care of.

I was having the worst time with menu_set_location(), completely unable to get it to work in _nodeapi, despite several examples throughout Drupal’s core code of it working during hook_view(). All I wanted to do was hang it off an existing menu item, but it took me an hour to come up with a formula. Almost everything I tried was actually more code than what I eventually came up with.

First, the site I’m working on for this uses a little technique where much of the structure of the site is in the Primary Links block (i.e, with links across the top) and many of those links have children items. But instead of using the secondary links bar, I have them displaying in a block.

Currently the Drupal pager system is an interesting look into some of the past decisions in Drupal design. The system is actually a very powerful paging system that can handle multiple pagers on the same page that act completely independently. However, it is also a kind of messy piece of code that stores a lot of its data in very obscure globals in formats that don't make sense. It is difficult to document and even more difficult to understand from the outside.

We're almost there with this. Only a few more days, hopefully. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it -- this is the planned destination of a crusade I've been on for several months now.

(I doubt the final product will look like this, but it's certainly a good start)

Some time ago, chx posted a method to do a multi-part form. The problem with the method was that it required a lot of interesting tricks that made the actual flow very difficult to understand and was very frustrating to use.

I have a simpler one. Here is a demo.

A quick review of both the #drupal IRC channel and the activity on the dev list is that, despite everything, Drupal’s new release system is a little confusing. And, truth to be told, it is a little confusing. In my [not so] humble opinion, this is not the fault of the implementation or the design of the system, but more the fault that Drupal users and developers have gotten accustomed to a system that sort of worked, but left a lot to be desired.

To start with, the original system worked well for Drupal core itself. This meant that a fair number of people, who primarily deal with core, never really got to get face to face with the problems that manifested on the contrib repository. But that’s a relatively small group of people, and all of them are very smart people. While it took some good arguing, the bulk of them were convinced that the new way is a better way, and thus the improvements actually came to pass.