[lincme.co.uk]

Ice-cream sundaes! Oh yes! Actually, that’s one direction Drupal has been going (not the ice-cream, sadly), which is the eventual simplification of data storage. The biggest problem now, I think, is that developers map their views to data, and vice-versa. Drupal stores everything and anything as a ‘node’. So a node can contain one word, a site link, a story, a page, images, files, or any combination of all by having nodes within nodes. Its Views module then allows you to say how nodes are displayed; as blocks (widgets), pages, in tables, rows, any kind of custom layout.

What I’m visualising at present is a way of doing things like BP’s activity stream, where data is any kind of node you like, and you decide whether nodes can overflow or are cut (eg., large images), displayed all at once or shown as a bite (eg., stories/pages and small excerpts with ‘read more…’) etc. You then just decide whether each site page appears as a single page, a list of related nodes kinda bloggish, a list of related nodes a-la activity stream, etc. A couple of clicks could create a stream, a shopping page, or whatever you wish. Users then have BP style filtering links, so they can view everything the view shows, just friend’s contributions, just their groups, etc. Off-site information can be pulled in via links as well, and displayed as the same kind of node (similar data, just a different source). Wrap all that around an individual member with a profile and roles/permissions, and you have the most powerful and adaptable social network there is.

As I say, you can do that with Drupal, but gawd is it time consuming for a large project. I like the way WordPress is going, and if BuddyPress follows suit in the simple and easy to use stakes, the two combined will be amazing.