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

Ok, if the first sentence of your comment is "I'm sorry, this isn't really related to this post" I'm going to delete your comment without reading it.

If you are having a problem with a module, http://drupal.org/support -- your resources are there. My blog -- and as far as I know, pretty much all blogs -- are not a Q&A. Nor is my email box, for those of you have forgotten my rant on that topic from last year.

Forums. Issue queue. These are where support requests go. Thanks.

Recently it's come up that some members of the community don't actually understand the Drupal Association, or what it does, or even who it is. I think there are probably several reasons for this void of knowledge, including the fact that Association meetings happen largely behind closed doors, and that we in the Association don't do a great job communicating what is actually happening behind those doors at this time. I hope to help fill in some knowledge gaps and set some people straight on what the Association is, who the Association is, and what the Association does.

In Panels, Context is lingo for a wrapper around any significant object. By default, Panels supports 'Node', 'Taxonomy term' (and terms as mentioned above), 'Taxonomy vocabulary', and 'User' as contexts.

These contexts can get into a display in more than one way; right now, there are three ways that a panel page can acquire a context:

In Drupal 6, FAPI 3 is finally getting to the point where it's powerful enough to do some of the things that it's been a real bear to do with it. For one, in Drupal 6 it now has image buttons, and using form alter you can now directly replace a regular submit button with an image button pretty easily. And submit buttons have their own submit and validate functions attached, so it's now very easy to have different buttons operate completely independently. This is a major improvement.

These are my high level design goals for Views 2.

Views 2 will be the Drupal 6 port. Views 1 will not be ported to Drupal 6; this is so we can make wholesale changes to the API at the same time there are other changes, reducing the number of complex upgrades required.

A lot of people don't realize how useful Node Queue is as a module; in part because the name doesn't do a very good job of explaining what the module does. For one thing, it almost seems like it duplicates taxonomy, or maybe bookmarks. But it does something none of those modules do: It orders your nodes completely arbitarily.

One other valuable point: Queues have a maximum size. When the queue is 'full', if a new item is added, the the last item in the queue is automatically removed.

What is this good for?

I've long been of the belief that Drupal's love/hate relationship with Object Oriented programming is kind of an odd situation. Most of the time it's not really a problem, but sometimes we come so close to using OO methodology that it seems like a waste that we're not simply OO. One of the places that really shows up is the Forms API.

The design of the Forms API is exceedingly OO; but we're not using OO at all. I spent a little time thinking about it, and I knocked off an idea of what the current Forms API might look like if it were OO.

"Jesse", a blogger who apparently has just one article and either wants to build a reputation for a new venture or simply wants to be anonymous (hard to say which) posted a fairly long article on his site called 4 problems with Drupal.

I read this article, and I started out a little annoyed. It makes some false or at least misleading assertions. I immediately commented on one obvious one, and then as I thought about it, I felt a need to address the entirety of his arguments, because they are, in all, flawed.

This isn't in the Drupal tag so that it won't go to the Planet; but I want this information easily available.

I want to record this conversation; I'm also lazy so I'm not really rewriting it, but I did edit it down somewhat. In short, fago and I spoke about Views 2 and what I have planned and what he can do to help. I ended up with a pretty good summary of the things I want to do: