Defining "drupalism"
I seem to use the word “drupalism” in a pejorative way. Usually, to to describe anything that follows one of these drupaly anti-patterns:
- The belief that one should hide settings at least 4 clicks away from wherever those settings matter. "That's where settings go.", so the argument runs.
- A purpose-agnostic interface element that receives “whatever” from other modules (think hook_links,, and the barf it spits out….)
- The belief that verbose help text fixes a poorly thought out interface, or form item heading.
- The belief that one needs to have a usability study -- as opposed to good taste, or common sense -- to backup decisions related to usability.
- Having form help text for the sake of having form help text (see the helptext on ./user/login.... if you don't chuckle, you lose help text writing privileges.
- A drupal hook that gets passed all of the following: a) a giant object, or array (by reference), b) an $op variable that has more than 5 possible values, c) usually several other arbitrary variables that change depending on the value of $op. hook_nodeapi, hook_user, hook_comment are the most obvious examples.
I've never seen the word “drupalism” used to describe a good thing. But, as I've argued time and again, I'm an idiot, and a fool -- perhaps even stoopid.