Required reading

Everyone coming to the conference (or suggesting ideas we should consider) should first read all of the papers, issues, blog posts, etc. that are listed in this post. If you have more to suggest, please do so.

Whitepapers/Documentation

• Data APIs for Drupal 7 and web services: A document by Henrique Recidive describing the hows and whys of the Data API. Added 01/22/2008: Also read almost every issue linked to by this paper.
• Active Records, a possible approach for consistent Data APIs: Document created by Nedjo Rogers and Henrique Recidive describing one approach to solving the Data API challenges.
• CCK API changes in D6 (yched: More specifically the 'widgets' section, for the current state of 'data / form element' association in CCK.)

Discussions

• Creating a library of CRUD API functions for Drupal: Mostly a discussion of best practices, how things ought to be divided, etc.
• nodify.module: Everything is a node: talks about the pros/cons of a central "meta" object in Drupal.
• Musings on Data API: Larry Garfield's thoughts on an alternative to the Active Record approach.

Code

• Data API: first steps: General save, load, update, etc. functions for Drupal
• Simplify hook_user() and user_save(), etc. to be more consistent with other object methods: Basic code to help unify hook_user and user_save with existing APIs so they can fit into above approach.
• Object Driver: A module by Peter Wolanin that has another approach to Data API by running everything through a central hook. (moshe: the object driver might be a good next step. we can clean up crap and implement that relatively easy, and then implement some deeper ORM.)
• Record module, by Henrique Recidive, which accompanies his Active Records paper mentioned above.
• Entities.php: An "entity loading system" from Konstantin Kaefer
• fapi3.php and accompanying presentation: Adrian's FAPI3 presentation, which outlines Data API-like things through the form system.