I just started to peek into the docs and source (Drupal 6 at the moment) and noticed that there are no classes to be seen, only vast number of prefixed functions. Is this handy? Does such decision have a background? Why?
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Why are you using Drupal 6? Drupal 8 is on the way! – iconoclast Nov 6 '12 at 15:28
This is pretty well explained on Drupal programming from an object-oriented perspective.
In short, Drupal has existed for much longer than you could properly use OOP in PHP. Which means, PHP5.
Drupal 7 already uses classes internally in a lot of places and it will probably continue so with Drupal 8.
But this is a step by step process and not everything needs to be a class. For example, it does not make any sense to make modules into a single class.
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Drupal 8 will be very OOP, pulling in many of the components of Symfony2. But the APIs for developers will still be the backward-compatible hooks, FTMP. – paul-m Jan 3 '13 at 21:03
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It will be a lot more OOP yet, and the point about the API's is not correct. That's just because things aren't completely converted yet. hook_block_*() just got replaced by the plugin system, for example, routing will change, configuration will change, the entity system has changed, ... – Berdir Jan 5 '13 at 13:45
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@Berdir I am very interested in how to leverage OOP PHP in Drupal 7 as I will probably not make the move to Drupal 8 right now. Are there some examples? – jerome Apr 12 '14 at 15:02
Drupal was created before oo became better in php5. Objects are being used more in drupal in each release but you need to balance a complete rewrite and adding new features.
