Field Tool

Pretty much every import/export module for Drupal (and there are some) has a tendency to implement their own hooks for retrieving information about node fields, and the CCK support that comes with them. Also, pretty much all of these solutions have a tendency to tie their hooks and field discovery to their module in some kind of way.

If you are a module developer and want to retrieve information about which kinds of stuff exists in a node, and what you can do with it... where do you get that information? Drupal core does not provide a registry for all node properties, let alone additional information like schema information or a standardized way to retrieve or set that data. CCK covers only a part of the whole node, disregarding the more fundamental properties like node author or creation date.

In short, the situation is clearly suboptimal. We need standardized information about fields and ways to access them, and the duplication in contrib modules has to stop. This module takes a shot at that issue by providing a simple, extensible way to build and retrieve field information. The idea is that all fields should be known to exist, but support for specific modules might or might not be present. Those functionalities are specified in the form of callbacks (standardized? module-specific? whatever!), and each module picks just the fields that are interesting to it.

Let's unify field information! Who's with me?

Modules currently using Field Tool

• Drupal Transformations
• Your module here?