NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

One nice thing with Drupal[6+] is that there not only is a standard way 
of doing things, it's heavily promoted.

In Joomla you have people who put their function libraries in the admin 
directory, and others put them in the public directory.....most split 
them into those that are admin related vs frontend related.

So it's a constant switch back and forth to find everything.

In drupal, everything is /in/ a specific directory.

Moreover, everything follows a common naming structure.

And lastly, for most function calls, you generally make the programmer 
specify the variables, you don't set a bunch of defaults[honestly, all 
the view->load() calls in Joomla drive me crazy trying to remember what 
the system defaults to in that specific instance.

Heck, things are standardized to the point where there is a module[erm, 
component] with a large database of rules to not only parse through code 
for bad practices, but it even will upgrade/convert the code for you.
http://drupal.org/project/coder
And add in http://drupal.org/project/coder_tough_love if you want to 
really hear chapter and verse in how you broke a lot of standards.

I'd love to see this for Joomla....   The one time I decided to run a 
code sniffer on some of my code, loaded up with all the Joomla 1.5 
coding standards library, it was discouraging to have to sift through 
all the Joomla Core broken standards to find my own problems.

And it's not like their even /difficult/ things to fix.  A lot of them 
just require someone to edit the file, as instructed, save it and commit it.

But with Joomla cruddy core repository, it is a real pain and 
demotivational.  I'd happily spend 3 days fixing a bunch of syntax 
problems[boring grunt work] if when I commit the work it goes in as 
"Commited by Gary Mort on XXX date.... message "Fixed 567 coding 
standard nits".

But instead, you have to:
Create an issue in the issue tracker.
Attach your patch file to the tracker.
IF someone feels like it from the core team, they might apply the 
patch.  But their likely to roll it up with some other patches, and 
commit it under their name[yes they will credit the bug tracker issue, 
and if one goes to the bug tracker one sees you did the coding....]

Open Source Coders contribute code for brownie points.  They /want/ to 
be recognized and not with a "thanks to " list with a bunch of names and 
no idea who did what[which has been ret-conned in the past].

This is one of /the/ reasons I'm a big proponent of VCS systems.  
Bazaar, Mercurial, and Git all merge different code changes in such a 
way as to bring along the commit history of who to thank[or blame].

It seems minor and trivial, but I think it's still true.  Give out 
brownie points and you get more [overweight] coders.

-Gary