Cracking Drupal®: A Drop in the Bucket

Development Terms

This next set of terms is a mix of general terms and some Drupal-specific meanings of more developer-focused terms.

Branch

A branch of code is a CVS concept. A developer can create a new branch of a file (or set of files), which represents a specific purpose. On its own, the branch is meaningless, but when given a specific naming convention as in the Drupal project and some documentation in the form of a release node, a branch gains meaning. Branches are commonly used to allow a developer to maintain two versions of a module: one for Drupal 6.x and one for Drupal 7.x. They can also be used to create a more stable and mature version of a module and a new experimental version of the module, such as 6.x-1.x and 6.x-2.x, where 2.x is the experimental version.

Callback

Plays a major role in the Drupal menu system, among other places. Each module that defines a menu entry must provide a function as the callback. When that path is requested, the menu system checks to see which function is associated with the path and calls that function. Similar patterns are used in the Form API.

Committer

Each project in Drupal has a list of users with developer access to commit code. For Drupal core this is a very limited and talented group of people. Individual contributed projects are less well organized and may have just one person who is a committer. Among the best projects, the committers will write very little code and spend most of their time reviewing the code of other ...