Hey all, This is just a bit of idle speculation (and it may even have been discussed before) but I wanted to share my observation. There may be a changing trend in how Drupal perceives node types.
Way back, a node type was handled by exactly one module. Most type-specific functionality could only be applied to the native type. For example, CCK defined "cck-clones" of all existing content types in 4.7. You need to go back as far as 4.0 (see changelog) to see book.module adding support for non-book nodes, but that's still where we came from. Even in Drupal 4.7 we had story.module and page.module providing what have since become custom content types created by the installation profile. Between Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5, a lot of these type-specific features became universal. CCK stopped implementing hook_node_info and expanded hook_nodeapi (which had only watched the 'delete revision' action before). story.module and page.module got axed. In Drupal 6, book.module stopped implementing hook_node_info() too, in favor of creating a type handled by node.module, and treating all node types the same way. Altogether, we're down to three hook_node_info implementations in Drupal 7 (from six in Drupal 4.7), which are blog.module, forum.module and poll.module. Coincidentally, these modules are all somewhat notorious: forum.module's has a very frustrating visual style, poll.module has been called our "regression test", and both poll.module and blog.module have been considered for removal (Google "remove X from core"). Only poll.module can still make a convincing case for using hook_node_info, but even poll stuff could in theory be added to generic nodes. Will hook_node_info() eventually die entirely, in favor of working on nodes centrally handled by node.module? Should it? Thanks for reading all the way, :) -Aran -- PGP: http://ermarian.net/downloads/0x27CA5C74 XMPP: [email protected] AOL: 282026638 @icq / RealArancaytar @aim URL: http://ermarian.net
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