Organizing Drupal Code

Question

How do you like to organize your Drupal code? One giant module? Separate modules per feature? Separate modules per code type (theme functions, menu hooks, etc...)?

I've started by trying to organize by feature, treating modules like they were libraries. Ultimately though things are never perfectly contained... modules want to use each other's theme functions, and modules are all contributing various tabs to a common page -- two examples of it not always being so clear where to find code. This tempts me to keep all theme functions together, and all hook_menus together, but this would be awkward for other reasons...

Assume that all code is too specific to eventually share, so there's no attempt here to make self contained contributed modules. I'm mostly concerned about maintaining sanity and cleanliness in a large scale Drupal site.

Answer 1

I tend to have a folder with one main module with all the shared functions, and a variety of sub-modules that are broken up by logical functional divisions. I've found the single huge module approach makes finding stuff in it rather unfun.

It really doesn't make much of a difference if you're not distributing it on Drupal.org, though, so whatever makes sense to you is fine.

Answer 2

I load all customizations into a single module per project (menu/form/link alters, etc.). If enough customization is done, I will fork the original module or create a new module with the original module as a dependency. It's at this point that it pretty subjective: I have no hard and fast rule saying 'fork a module when I reach this many function points or lines of code'.

Anything that adds functionality (meaning that it doesn't override something else) goes into it's own module.

If any newly created or forked modules can be used in other projects or contexts, I will publish them to my personal repository.

Answer 3

I most often use a single module and a set of include files where I store my classes. Although views uses more than one module, it is a great example of the this strategy. Take a look at the views module includes folder to see what I mean.