Sometimes You Need to Rewrite the Code...
Sometimes a piece of code is beyond simple fixing. It's time to scratch it and rebuild the functionality from the ground up. For Drupal 6, this was the menu system. For non-Drupalers: the menu system in Drupal has many, many roles, far beyond the simple task of displaying a menu tree. In this talk, I will tell the history of this rewrite, one of the largest rewrites in the history of Drupal and share a few lessons which are likely to be useful to everyone who ever go down the "let's rewrite" route with an open source project -- maybe even during any software development.
Within the Drupal community, our beloved chx (Károly Négyesi), who cannot be distracted, is recognized as the Drupal core developer with the most code via patches.
What is not known, is that Károly is also a national hero in his native Hungary. During my summer visit to Budapest, I saw an amazing number of signs in his recognition: There are streets named after him, and even parks!
See the photo set on Flickr.
Since the signs are in Magyar, Hungary's national language, I went to an expert on that language who is a university professor and a native speaker too. He confirmed that "kert" means "cannot be distracted", and "korut" means "does not sleep", and "V. ker. Belvaros" means "very cool Drupal core developer".
Nice to see Karoly get the recognition he deserves.
