It seems peculiar to me that each user record has a 255 character signature field, but that this signature is only used on comments posted by the user. Forum topics, blogs, stories, book pages -- none of them display the signature.
Why not? Was there a good reason for this? Seems to me that if the user has entered one, she would probably want to use it most everywhere.
On the homepage, http://drupal.org/, there is a link under the introduction paragraph to screenshots, URL http://drupal.org/image. When I click on that, I am taken to a discussion page with no screenshots.
In testing 4.2 today, I was using the user profile module. Then I decided to write my own custom user data module, and stop using the Drupal supplied profile module. That worked fine, but in testing it, I was examing the database. I noticed that all of the old data for the now-unused profile module is still in the "data" column of the "users" table.
So I spent some time thinking about this design, and why it makes it hard to get rid of data stored in a multi-element column like "data" in the "users" table. In a sense, it is serialized data, like that used by PHP sessions and by lots of other applications. The advantage to using this method for storing data is it makes it easy for the programmer to add new data fields because no database change is required. it also makes upgrading or installing patches a little bit easier, for the same reason.
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
