README

What?
This is a "hollow out" approach style fork of Drupal 7.8.

- Many functions will be lifted up as-is, and re-examined for more streamlining.
- Many constants will be removed.
- Many core modules will be removed.
- A decent amount of the core concepts in Drupal will be maintained, as they are "best of breed" I believe.

Why?
- The mix of arrays and objects is messy.
- The introduction of more OO code, and PHP 5.3 requirements on some contrib modules is starting to fragment the supportability and consistency throughout the project.
- I think a few things can be done cleaner, and better. Also, it's a hobby. :)

Things to keep, for the most part:
- hook system
- form API
- drush style management
- entity/field idea (anything and everything can be a first-class citizen, and reference each other)
	- field, field_ui, but also node (node would be merged into generic "entity" type nomenclature)
- user and access management
	- may get confusing if users are managed as entities instead. perhaps userid -> entity reference is all it stores
- CSS/JS aggregation/compression
- menu router configuration
- pathing
	- pathauto, for sure
- views
- filters (input and output), text formats
- taxonomy
- logging
	- watchdog/dblog can be expensive and difficult to follow

Things to improve:
- everything should use .php extension (no more webserver "blocking" having to be done)
- file API
- cron access
- "Content Type" management should be "Entity" management
- Comments and Users will be managed as entities
	- comment should be removed from core
- multi-site; currently is too flexible, probably too much overhead
- module code living inside of the web root; ideally, it could live outside, with menu router items established
	- javascript/css would be applied using the drupal_add_css() style approach, and using special scheme:// file URI
- profiles and distributions
- update
	- make it work as well as a drush update works
- rename functions like check_plain() and such to be more descriptive

Things to reduce:
- decrease file i/o
	- less includes
	- less file scanning "magic" - heavy caching
- build-in modules - slimmer micro-kernel
- memory usage can grow large with a Drupal install; examine various ways to decrease memory usage, and CPU spikes

Things to remove:
- all objects (especially when it is only attributes)
	- bad: ->
	- bad: ::
- all OO
- PDO - remove PDO, but keep the idea of generic data access
	- generic data access may be a v2 thing. might need to get back to basics first
- built-in "core" modules: aggregator, blog, book, color, comment, contact, forum, openid, overlay, poll, profile, shortcut, statistics, tracker, translation, trigger
	- some of these belong in "beefier" contributed modules
	- the "core" should be lightweight and expose only the most optimized set of APIs, hooks, and functionality to extend upon

Standards:
- no PHP 5.3 specific code
	- no namespaces
	- no "short array" syntax
- no OO code
- whitelist of "allowed" PHP functions

Focus on the priorities and desires:
- media/asset handling
- mobile support
	- including supporting themes w/ responsive design
	- making publishing via mobile easier - web services and APIs can help
- WYSIWYG editor
	- many options; should limit options
	- syntax highlighting is broken in many setups
- better APIs
- content import/export
- native HTML5/CSS3
- content staging
- configuration management
- usability
- web services
	- fix services to use CRUD properly, and not require PUT/DELETE

Things to ensure are in place:
- testing framework
- internationalization
	- translation
	- localization
- pluggable authentication
	- authmap isn't very well documented. perhaps something better or easier to understand can be implemented
- module extensibility