"civinode" - civicrm does selective i18n in drupal

look at http://drupal.org/node/56661. I'll contact them to make sure the multi-lingual issues will work - AD

Here are a few issues related to internationalization and civicrm and a proposed solution, 'civinode':

1. i18n only acts on nodes
2. the civicrm code base is not very accessible to drupal developers
3. civicrm is resource intensive
4. the civicrm database is very handy as a 'flexinode' kind of repository but that's not the core expertise or goal of civicrm ...

So - my proposal is to write a relatively small drupal module that 'compiles' the required civicrm data into drupal nodes loosely coupled to the corresponding civicrm record. This would allow:

1. i18n to work (there'd be separate nodes for each language, so you could have translations, e.g. a listing of board members in both english and french)
2. civicrm wouldn't need to be loaded for simple listing and node display
3. the code would be more accessible and extensible by drupal developers

I understand that previous versions of civicrm did store the individual records in nodes, but it was decided not to - if anyone out there remembers this discussion and can bring it bear on this proposal it'd be great.

And here are a few concerns:

1. making sure that the civinode type nodes are appropriately in-sync with the core civicrm data
2. providing a good admin interface for determining which civicrm records get corresponding civinodes

And another idea - there have been a few requests to integrate the taxonomy system into civicrm - one way to do this would be to automagically correspond civicrm groups with taxonomy terms.

Anyone?