sirkitree.net //say it out loud, /ˈsərkitrē/

In Dries' keynote speech this year, one of the things he talked about was having some sort of Activity log for Drupal. I've worked for a while on a module called just that, Activity, and I think it's conception was originally based around what Dries was referring to; logs of activity of what users are doing on a Drupal site. The original methods implemented by Activity module were pretty terrible and over time became somewhat bloated and hard to maintain. The overall architecture was not well thought out (it was my first module) and there has since been a good bit of duplication in this area. When I failed to maintain this growing Frankenstein, jaydub stepped in and championed the maintenance and feature requests of the module. He maintained the 5.x branches as well as the porting to 6.x and many subsequent feature requests.

I stopped using the module for work, and my own interest and participation waned. I then moved to ParentsClick and there was a feature request for our redesign for this type of functionality again, so after learning much more from the talented Ted Serbinski and Scott Reynolds, I began to try to muster support from the community and from my co-workers to help re-architect the module into something that made much more sense; extensibility, performance and core integration being the main focuses. After much discussion on the Social Networking Sites group (both technical and feature-wise), and many hours of consultation from my co-workers, we slowly came to the conclusion that Actions were the way to go. This would allow us to use core functionality for the recording, Triggers for the UI (though I still find this has a slight learning curve) and Views 2 integration for the display. I'm also hosting a BoF session at Drupalcon to try to do this same thing. Hopefully I get some interest from the community and we can all work together to come up with the best solution. I'll be posting notes from the session, so if you miss it, I hope you'll at least be able to see what comes out of it. "Coordinate, don't plan!" - Dries Buytaert, Drupalcon DC, 2009