Schemr

Overview

Schemr is a development tool that makes it easier to document complicated CCK field schemas. It is a natural counterpart to Features. Where Features can be used to transport schemas between Dev and Live sites, Schemr can be used to describe them.

This is particularly useful if you are trying to accomplish one or both of the following:

1. You want to document your schema to make it easier to build node and page templates. Schemr's output is human-readable, so developers and themers can use it to identify field names, types, and usage per type throughout a site.
2. You want to manually maintain your schema as content, not code, but you still want to document changes to it. If you are running into bugs with Features (particularly in a rapidly evolving schema) you might use Schemr as an alternative. See below for more on this option.

Schemr is a new module - bear with me while I get it uploaded and then update it to support D7.

Version-control and schemas

Normally it's hard to put a schema into version control. You basically have three options:

1. Periodically dump your database to disk, and version-control that dump file. This is extremely inefficient and hard to read, although it does have the advantage of being 100% accurate.
2. Use Features to act as an interface between your schema and files on disk. However, what Features outputs is very hard to read for humans.
3. Commit schema documentation to the repository separately from Features. Schemr allows you to do this.