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Over the last days, I helped a client with some bugs in a really complex Drupal site. The site is that complex, because clients “needs” and “wishes” were to be met. So gradually more and more modules were stacked onto this Drupal.
Resulting in a site that no-one can really grasp. At all.

Now, if modules in Drupal were entirely self-contained and very loosely coupled, something I consider good practice, this would be of little problem.

It seems Grid systems, or CSS frameworks, are being picked up by the Drupal themer community. I think this is a good thing. Some think it is a bad thing. So let us have a look at the downsides and upsides of grid systems in Drupal.

Grid Systems force you to change your HTML, that is bad.

This is wrong, for three reasons.

1. It might be bad, if it were true. But not all grid systems, or their implementations require changes to the HTML, in theory. I love SASS and its tool-kit Compass.

Drupal is not object oriënted (OO). No really, it is not! It merely borrows some design principles from OO, and uses some design concepts (such as the Observer Pattern, or hooks, in Drupal) from OO. Though many Module developers actually use another design principle, that of Classes. When creating a module, one can borrow almost all ideas from the (good) design of classes, to create a good design for a module.

Maybe you think: “Why should I design my module”?

Actually, it is very simple: I had a slot in February. And one in May. Both are gone now.

But because of the lack of anything stable-ish, I decided to use that slot for diving into some documentation on the proposed (and some submitted) changes to 7. And on getting stuff synched and tagadelic migrated to git(hub).

A blogpost on Merge brought a question back that has haunted me for a while now. What about all these small modules?

First part of that question is: How to deal with the many small modules, day-to-day?. Quite often, I see sites that drag more then 50 modules along. Most often these are really very simple sites.

yelvington writes: “The first rule of coding for Drupal: We do not write code for Drupal.” I must say, that after years , I come to the exact opposite conclusion. Right now, I should be writing another webshop (instead I am writing a blog-post, but this article is not about procastrination :)).

I was one of the most outspoken for getting the first CCK, flexinode into core. Not that project itself, per sé, but the concept.