DISQUS

Jesse, I agree about the user hooks. They are fairly antiquated; nobody has really been doing any maintenance on the user.module stuff, so the existing code gets carried forward with every version. As near as I can tell, it hasn't changed significnatly since at least Drupal 4.4 (maybe earlier -- hard to say since I wasn't on the project way back then).

The node system also used to allow you to modify the node table directly and add fields; this got removed for revisions, and has been on teh slate to get put back, except that nobody has picked up the cause.

It's something I want to do, but I can only carry so many causes and that one isn't quite making the list. Maybe if I get insomniac one night I'll work on it.

I posted a more complete response here: http://www.angrydonuts.com/a_response_to_4_prob...

Actually, you're wrong about foo_load() as well, though you're right in general about the hook system. (It's just that foo_load is a special type of hook that is not invoked universally, it is only invoked when the 'foo' content type is loaded).

From the description of views above you can probably guess that the module programmatically generates SQL from the parameters specified on the administrative page. As anyone familiar with frameworks and CMSs knows, generated SQL is almost universally awful. The views module provides no exception. This SQL is only there to fetch a list of node ids, mind you. Each individual node id is then passed to node_load, which then results is another avalanche of database hits, even if the SQL generated by views is already using some of this data to filter the list of node ids. For example, if I had a view which produced list of all posts authored by “jim” it would generate SQL something like

Dude, do your research.

Views only does a node_load if it has to. There are a lot of situations where it has to for various reasons. You'd know that if you actually studied it as much as you claim to have.

Blogs aren't an accurate snapshot of a person's identity; they're a window into whatever that person wants to let out. If someone has emotions they want to express, they get magnified on blogs, because you only see a fairly small slice of what's really going on with that person. When all you see is someone expressing the louder emotions, you miss all of the quieter, more normal ones that the blogger doesn't feel are noteworthy, because they're
just day-to-day things.

It was a fairly localized campaign, and 'Sted has friends in so many places I had no idea where to even look for them all. =)