Your Site Should be Full of BEANs*
From: Dave Hall
To: boxes boxes-module@drupal.org
Subject: Our Relationship
Dear boxes,
I’m sorry but things just aren’t working out between us. It’s not you, it’s me. I need some time to myself. I need to think things through. I’m not sure what I want. We should spend some time apart. We should try new things. I will miss you, but this is for the best. Let’s meet for coffee in a couple of weeks.
Love
Dave xox
Breaking up is never easy, but recently I broke up with the boxes module. I’d been with boxes for a long time, we’d done a lot of good things together. Over time I’d become oblivious to some of boxes’ flaws, such as giving black eyes to sys admins who run features reverts on sites where users can edit boxes. Life was pretty good, but my life still felt somewhat empty and incomplete.
One day I was standing in a crowded room with lots of modules on drupal.org and across the room I spotted BEAN. I feel in love instantly. BEAN was decked out in all the latest Drupal 7 gear - fields, Entity API and CTools. The way BEAN moved make me weak at the knees. After another beer I got my courage up, crossed the room and asked if BEAN would like to come back to my site. I was shocked, BEAN wanted to hang out with me and it wasn’t just a one night fling. I’ve been going steady with BEAN for a couple of months now.
Just before BEAN moved in permanently to my dev environment I had to find a way of removing all the remnants of boxes from my life (aka existing sites). It took me less than an hour. I created a new BEAN type and called it “box”, I then wrote a little “drush scr” script which converted all of my boxes to BEANs and even updated my contexts to use the newly created BEANs. I hope neither bean or boxes finds my work on github. I chose github hoping neither of them would find my work and also because I don’t want to maintain this as a module on d.o.
On a serious note - BEAN is awesome! If you haven’t tried it, you really should. BEAN treats blocks as content, not config which is really useful for most sites. For new sites BEAN is a drop in replacement for core blocks or boxes making it super easy to get started. To learn more check out the docs.
If you’re interested in seeing the full power of the BEAN module, and other cool stuff I’ve been working on recently, please comment on my DrupalCon session proposal - An Enterprise Scale Drupal Workflow. It will be a more technical version of my session at Drupal Business Days a couple weeks ago.
* “Full of beans” is phrase commonly used in Australia to describe energetic children.