Here's a little function I wrote today because I needed to be able to turn a list of between one and three items into a string like 'apples, oranges, and pears', 'apples and pears', or just 'stairs'.

I figured I might as well handle everything in one place, and throw in the option to have an 'or' instead of an 'and'. There may be occasions you don't want the Oxford comma, but I can't think of any.

Now the real question: how would you make this translatable?

I'm not a fan of repeating myself, or of doing the same work twice. So when I first got a look at FieldAPI back at DrupalCon Paris, my thought after 'Wow this is going to change everything,' was 'Every module that converts its custom data storage to this is going to be doing the same work, over and over'.

It seemed to me that we have a lot of modules that add things to stuff. The examples that spring to mind include Taxonomy image (add an image to a taxonomy term), Comment upload (add an uploaded file to a comment), User terms (you get the picture), and the daddy of them all, Image (which now we must call Image Oldskool, due to there being a shiny new Image module in Core).

What all these have in common is that on Drupal 7 their things-to-stuffness would be perfectly served by FieldAPI. Users get more flexibility, an expanding universe of formatters and widgets; module maintainers can write less code and in some cases even hang up their hats on a particular project as it can live entirely in configuration space. Everyone wins. But how to get there?

This matter has been bubbling at the back of my mind ever since Paris. On the one hand I could sort of see how this could be all done with a single framework: you tell it what sort of entity you are dealing with (node, comment, term), which bundle (article, page, which vocab), what your fields are, and how to load the old data. The framework creates the fields for you, then runs a batch to load each object, moves values around in clever ways that you don't need to worry about, and then saves the object. Banzai! Your data is now saved in a field.

On the other hand, this was clearly crack. Of the highest order.

And yet it works. It quite possibly still is crack, and some extra pairs of eyes to de-crackify it would be very welcome. But I can confirm that I've run data conversions on both User terms and oldskool Image nodes, and got term fields on my users and beautiful image fields on my nodes.

There remains some work to be done: I'd like to make conversion to file and image fields a bit more straightforward and create a nice way to specify how to populate the alt and title fields for images. And all this is largely academic and has only run on D7 databases with dummy D6 tables imported, since core's 6 to 7 upgrade process is not currently working. So I could use a hand. And if you have a things-to-stuff module, get in touch and give it a whirl.