matslats.net

Barely a sigh of relief as I release version 1 of the Complementary currencies module for Drupal is laid to rest. I have already, in connection with the current project, shamelessly started improving it. This week two turns in the roadmap each revealed large vistas of unexplored future.

Firstly I decided to separate out the mutual credit accounting engine from all the other services which Drupal provides. This will produce a mutual_credit_api module which stores transactions, calculates the balances, and returns data for display in various formats. Then other modules can come along and create transactions in any way that they want. My mc_transactions module will be an excellent, flexible web site form, but we can have modules for SMS, external transactions or anything at all.

Then today I spoke to a an expert from the government sector. Happy to say he had heard of my project, but quickly saw it didn't suit his needs. He said

you need to abstract the thing and have a glue layer so you can snap it into the plugins / add-ons of all the big Web 2.0 tools out there.

Right. I wish understood this more fully. Which big web 2.0 tools is he talking about, and what plugins / addons? I can find that out later but only confirms that I have to go beyond my previous revelation. And how will I work beyond Drupal? I'm a Drupal ninja now, and Drupal is in its prime - should I now start learning something else? Do I never get to capitalise on my skills?

So what's needed is a mutual credit banking service which is outside of Drupal. It will be accessed by an api which has commands like

• try_transaction
• create_transaction
• show_user_balances
• list_transactions

This is exactly what Joshua Zeidner was telling me over a year ago. Right, I said, you make the api (i've never made an api before) and I'll make Drupal work with it. that was before he went to work for Cyclos, and then bought a house...
And it also brings me closer to the opensourcecurrency project which is concentrating more on the api than the user features, I think.