How do you translate your inheritance relations between classes with drupal ?
Suppose we have a super class "employee" with the three properties : name ; phone ; email and subclasses that are specific types of employees.
Then how will you implement this with drupal ?
The best way I see is to use CCK module and to share the fields of the super class between the node types of the subclasses.
The good points are that :
CCK can be seen as a class constructor in drupal. All the plugins we can find with CCK let us build our classes with more and more possibilities.
CCK will also let us override some behaviors of our super class for each sub-classes (the controller and the view methodes defined with our fields).
If we don't create a special node type for our super class, then we have an abstract class (that cannot be instanciated).
CCK let us build multiple inhéritance(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_inheritance).
It would be interesting to go ahead and discuss other features involved or needed for implementing inheritance relations with drupal.
Useful links :
Definition of inheritance on wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_%28object-oriented_programming%29
