By bslade on

I use Drupal for misc consulting consulting jobs and I've always been frustrated by the lack of database documentation.

Depending on how much money this would cost, I might be interested in paying someone to document the core tables in the Drupal database. If this were done, where should the db documentation go? As comments into in the database.mysql file? Or as a new subheading under the Handbook chapter Developing for Drupal?

Ben in DC
PublicMailbox at benslade dot com

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

platypus media’s picture

platypus media commented

What exactly do you want done for documentation for the tables? I have a pretty decent understanding of the database structure, so I might be able to accomodate you.

Mike

bslade’s picture

bslade commented

I'm thinking I could generate the Entity-Relationship diagrams (or whatever the UML crowd calls them now) pretty easily, but I was looking for definitions for fields.

For example, in the node table what are the legal values and meanings of those values for the following fields:

  • type
  • score
  • votes
  • status
  • promote
  • moderate
  • ...and so on

I would want this sort of info for all of the core tables in Drupal.

I think that to do this right is probably a lot of work, so I would want to first get a few examples of documentation so we could make sure there's an understanding on the level of detail needed.

Thanks
Ben in DC

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

There is an issue I created for this purpose:

http://drupal.org/node/28046

Any contributions would be welcome and points for discussion should be added there.
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knobelspies’s picture

knobelspies commented

... for the e-commerce package the project- and the aggregator-modules can be found here

fgm’s picture

fgm
Primary language French
Location Paris, France
commented

This one documents the taxonomy system

http://blog.riff.org/index.php/2005/11/27/34-grokking-drupal-the-taxonom...

As usual, it can be reused for the manual: it is under a CC2.0 BY NC SA license (diagram under CC2.0 BY).

UPDATE: it is now included in the handbook on drupal.org, awaiting revision.

UPDATE 2: all my series on the data models is now in the manual awaiting revision (mod queue).

niooi’s picture

niooi commented

If anyone is ready to develop this schema for Ben and get pay for it, it would help the whole community users, developers and users' client to make a move onto Drupal and acquire it more rapidly.

Thanks Ben for this contribution,

niooi

Martin Haanz’s picture

Martin Haanz commented

umm, yeah

geek.de.nz’s picture

geek.de.nz commented

Hi there,

I'm doing a database and ISD project in my bachelor of information science. Part of it is to (partially) document the Drupal database. I think it would be too much to document everything until the end of the project (October). But I will document as much as I need for it free. I could go on after that, because it would probably be easy then. I cannot estimate the hours as of yet so I cannot tell you how much it will cost. I will have an idea once I finished the proejct. My understanding of databases is quite good (A+ in all courses related). I was planning on making a HERM (Higher Order Entity Relationship Model) Diagram and describing the possible values by doing some analysis on an example database.

Developers of Drupal who want to give me some more information about the database are welcome to do so (geek.de at gmail dot com).