Services in Drupal 6 or Drupal 7

So contratz to the Drupal community on releasing Drupal 7 !

We're about to do some projects involving Drupal as a content store supplying data to various sources using services.

I did some research on how to best do this and if we can already use Drupal 7 or should still stick to Drupal 6 for a while.

Use case : an expandible nav tree

Use case description : Create an expandible nav tree for drupal that would allow a dynamic navigation of a hiërarchy of elements that are related to each other using cck node reference fields .

Platform : Drupal 6.13

Use case : editable node reference fields in Drupal

Use case description : being able to edit a node reference field in view mode and getting a popup that allows the creation of the referenced content type node if the user wants to create a new node.

Platform : Drupal 6.13

Solution : I tried different combinations of modules, as there are many cck node-reference related modules that claim to do something like what I wanted but never exactly that. The winning combo proved to be the following list of modules:

In fide Graphviz generation

So we needed a way to automatically output the network created by the nodereferences on an iphone. Normally, I would have used flex to do this, as it has a nice programming paradigm (object oriented) and loads quickly in a browser. Unfortunately, the wise men at apple do not allow flash to work it's magic, so another solution had to be found.
Wouter one day sent me a link to a Durpal content filter for Graphviz. Graphviz is a command-line tool creating static network visualisations based on text files. For example, you can create a jpg network representation based on a text represenation. The content filter didn't work, but Graphviz did. In the infideconstans custom durpal module, I wrote a function that outputs the relevant content in the system as a *.dot file. This file is then converted every 15 minuntes as a part of a cron job which was set on the debian server itself.

In fide constans game flow : workflow_ng and ACL integration

So the way to go for the development of the in fide constans game flow seems to be to combine workflow_ng with ACL. ACL stands for access control list, which allows the controle of access by users to content on a per node level. It's just an API, without any UI. The integration of workflow_ng and ACL is only available as a patch. Basically, it defines some extra actions that can be carried out on $node objects and that call ACL functions.

Dough development setup

To further streamline our development and make sure that we are able to do more complex projects in the future, I've been thinking about a way to organize development in terms of setup. It's important to do this when things are relatively quite as they are now, cuz when the shit hits the fan, there's no time to be wasted on learning production methods. So here are some of my suggestions.

IDE

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