What I want from Drupal.

I've been using Drupal for 6 or 7 weeks now and I think its quite incredible. I first used Linux some ten years ago. It took me a few months to realise that the machine I'd been booting up almost every night had been running a web server all that time. Then I discovered cgi, and then database adapters and I thought 'You can do anything with this!' Then I realised I didn't have the time, or the brains, to build a web application that was as good, or as complex, or secure as I wanted. Since then I've played around with different frameworks (zope - ugghh; ruby on rails - which I liked) and RoR was a favourite for a time. I liked its virtually seamless interaction with the DB. But still, you start only with bare bones with Ruby on Rails, and it would take ages to build anything.

I always disliked the inflexibility of CMSs. But what I like about Drupal is that I think it kind of blurs the boundary between a development framework and a CMS. I've listened to a few of the Lullabot podcasts (which stretch back to 2006) and it's obvious that Drupal has changed a lot since then. And it's going to change a lot in the future, I'm sure. I did install Drupal in the past, but dropped it without getting to know it properly. If I'd have stuck with it I'd probably have found it lacking. Too much hacking in php for my liking. But when I look at Drupal now, and the direction it's evolving in, it seems like it's destined to be the first truly flexible open source, point-and-clink, in-the-browser, database driven web app builder. The incredible power you can achieve by combining a few modules like cck, views, rules or workflow make the mind spin.

One little thing I would really, really like to see though is cck fields in views. I'd like to be able to display a few fields from a content type and also display some other fields as input widgets from the same content type (or a related content type). And it would be nice to be able to modify the label and the help-text for the input widgets that appear in the view. So, you'd see the view displaying some fields (as you do now), but there'd also be an input box to modify a selected field (or fields) and a submit button to post the modifications. I've looked, but I don't think there's anything like this amongst the contrib modules. The closest I've come is Views Embed Form, which at the very least demonstrates that putting an input widget in a form can certainly be done. It would be nice to be able to build the features I want (or do I mean need!) on top of this nice little module, but I don't have to know how about Drupal and it's workings (yet, if ever). But it seems to me like most of the structure is already there in views and cck (and views embed form). All that's needed is a bit a clever glue to stick it together. Maybe I'm missing something - maybe it's not that simple.

Anyway, this has been itching me for a couple of weeks now, so I thought I should write about it. I'd be very interested to hear what anybody else thinks. Is it possible? Would it be useful? My dream is that a module along these lines will soon be up there on http://drupal.org/project/usage. Perhaps not... sigh.

I wonder if Zope has evolved into something that's user friendly by now.