Improvements to core

I think it's time taxonomy module got some more love in core. Drag and drop etc. was nice to get in D6, but there's much more we could do. Also I keep seeing various taxonomy administration helper modules cropping up - which is good, but there's no core patches cropping up alongside them, which is a shame, so I'm starting this in the hope of generating some discussion about things we could do this release cycle.

There's three obvious areas where Taxonomy could use some help.

Administration:

Merging terms.
Moving terms between vocabularies.
Mass operations (delete, edit).

Been sitting on this idea for a while: curious to see what people think.
In a nutshell, the idea is to combine and generalize the various flags for a node that are available in node.tpl.php, and open them up to modules.

For example, instead of the $is_front, $page, $sticky, and $teaser booleans, you'd have an array with entries present if the flag is true. Something like this, for example:

Core would take care of shoving those keys in; other modules would given a chance to add their own to a node.

That's the plan. Here's why I think it's cool:

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As some of you know, I've recently taken over maintenance of Inline and Image Assist, and initiated the Wysiwyg project. That was not only caused by personal interest, but also to take the necessary steps to realize the long awaited Inline API. You might ask yourself, what those three modules have in common or to do with each other at all: They deal with user input, allow to embed complex contents into a content, and provide an interactive GUI for that. If you already had the chance to work with them, you already know that there is a rather hidden, non-obvious hard-dependency between them.

Although I'd really like to discuss both topics (Inline and Wysiwyg support) separately, the gained experience on these topics enforces us to discuss them concurrently. The following mockup hopefully explains why: (see attachment to view in full size)

Drupal is formatting the user input by applying a set of customized filters before the content is send to visitor’s browser. In other words the user input is stored untouched in the database (except the SQL injection filtering) and then the filter module is performing code cleanup and formatting at the HTML output. In fact the input formats are... output formats :)

The past two-three weeks I've spent a lot of time in the Drupal 6 issue queue. This involved a mixture of reviewing patches I really wanted to see get into Drupal 6, writing or re-rolling some small patches for small bugs and typos, and trying to clear the issue queue as much as I could down to a manageable size. I commented on something like 160 issues in seven days, and read through many more.