Cwgordon7's blog

What would the advantages be of (theoretically, of course) having Drupal as an object-oriented content management system? So I answered myself:

• Inheritance. Say, for example, you wanted to write a custom node type. No problem! Just have your new class extend the object type "Nodes", and it automatically has all the properties of a node you want it to: it also is easy to define new properties of nodes, etc. It would also allow easy override of core modules WITHOUT hacking the core: you want your site to allow all users to do anything they want? Simple! Create a module that extends the class "Users", make a function in that new object that overrides user_access() by always returning TRUE, and set your site to use the User Object "MyUserObject", and *POOF*, everyone can suddenly do anything they want to. The potential uses of this are huge: you could extend filters, blocks, users, nodes, menus, etc.
• Allow for contributed modules to have similar inheritance properties. Wouldn't it be useful if, when you're writing that views.inc file, to be able to, instead, extend a "Views" class? You could then do virtually anything you wanted there, without having to worry about what hooks to use, etc.
• Makes Drupal easier to understand for new users who are programmers. Since almost all programming languages are Object Oriented, one can assume that almost all programmers are familiar with objects; jumping into Drupal seems much more approachable as they say "Oh! I know what an object is! I can do this!"
• Associate objects with functions. It would be quite useful, for example, to have a $node->delete() function instead of having to do node_delete($node). The PHP of the future is object oriented, and if we jump on the bandwagon, we will be helping ourselves to the free benefits of object-oriented power as PHP becomes more and more object oriented. Drupal is based on PHP, and to ignore PHP's objects will be deadly for Drupal in the long run.

I'm not saying that this will be easy to achieve. In fact, this will be incredibly hard to achieve, and would require an almost complete rewrite of Drupal. However, it is the way to go: hopefully we'll see some changes towards object-oriented programming as we move into Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.