The Zen of Drupal?

By styro on 28 Feb 2006 at 17:28 UTC

The Python community has a concept of things being "pythonic" or not. It's a loosely defined subjective feeling experienced Python programmers (ie not me) get when looking at Python code. It's a judgement about how well that code or design works with the language rather than against it. It becomes a cultural thing that seems to get passed on from programmer to programmer without anyone really being able to put their finger on it. It kinda gives the language its 'personality' and best practices.

Does Drupal have a similar concept?

The closest anyone can seem to get to defining what "pythonic" actually means seems to be this:

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch*.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

* Before anybody wonders about that bit - Guido van Rossum the creator of Python is Dutch :)

Now it seems to me that Drupal seems to have it's own personality and culture that we seem to unconsciously soak up (to varying degrees) after sitting in it for a while. There are also "Drupalish" ways of doing things vs "non-Drupalish" ways of doing things. As an example the taxonomy system is a classic Drupal concept that can be wielded beautifully when working with it or turned into a nightmare when trying to fight against it.

What defines "Drupalish"? (note: must think up a better word)

Should we as a community come up with a "Zen of Drupal" way of thinking that imparts these concepts to newcomers without them having to learn the hard way. After all, I suspect most newbies site design problems with Drupal are probably more conceptual than technical. Do we need to document more higher level conceptual ideas?

Now I don't feel like an experienced enough Drupal user to write these myself, but maybe I could make a start. In no particular order:

it's best to explore Drupal before diving into a site implementation
taxonomy is just about categorization
chances are there is already a module that can do that
it is probably already somewhere in the handbook
it's amazing how much you can do with just CSS
extend the core rather than hack it
chances are that it's something to do with your webhosts configuration
yes, databases and webservers can be complicated

Note some of these may just be plain wrong or stupid - corrections and refinements are more than welcome :)

Feel free to add some more concepts in the comments here, we might end up with enough good ones to create a handbook page.

Comments

small is beautiful, tiny is

szczym commented 28 February 2006 at 17:44

small is beautiful, tiny is lovely
content is master, interface is slave

___
Obin.org - Independent media workshop

You are certainly

sepeck commented 28 February 2006 at 18:05

You are certainly experianced enough to start on it. Once you get to far in, it gets more difficult to explain.

One of the new audiences we are attracting are those not coming from the Open Source movement. We need some general philosophy pages and intro to Open Source as well. To introduce our new folks to the Open SOurce community in general and then your page to introduce them to Drupal in specific.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Agreed about the open source culture intro

styro commented 28 February 2006 at 18:27

Maybe we could just pilfer (sorry - fork hehe) some of what other people have written eg ESR or Bruce Perens etc. I imagine any ESR stuff might need much editing first though :)

Anybody have any links to good material?

--
Anton

Oh absolutly, just customize

sepeck commented 3 March 2006 at 04:58

Oh absolutly, just customize and quote the parts relavant to our community with links back to the source

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

After having a look around

styro commented 3 March 2006 at 07:57

I can't really find anything that even compares to the excellent stuff you guys (the documentation team) have put in the first few sections of the About Drupal handbook.

It seems to pretty much say it all. I don't think the challenge is writing more - it's getting newbies to actually read what's already there.

I think the handbook speaks in a better more natural language for Drupal newbies than the 'open source' writers do. ie less jargon, more concise etc.

--
Anton

Tell you what then. Some of

sepeck commented 3 March 2006 at 08:15

Tell you what then. Some of the pages can probably be better written combined or organized so that they can be more visible. Try looking at it from that perspecitve. Eaton has an interesting approach that's close enough to what I was thinking of that we can tie this all together.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

A few more

Tresler commented 28 February 2006 at 18:12

* Yes, someone should do something like that, when will you start?
* README twice, Implement once.
* Give a man the code, and he eats for a day, teach a man to code and he eats for a lifetime. (or woman, of course)

Finally,
* Install, Enable, Access.

eh?! :P

Zen commented 28 February 2006 at 18:14