Trace is a project that started, like these things tend to, as an innocent, experimental Drupal module I hacked together to implement all of the core hooks exported by Drupal.

I was at the time working on Boost and wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the conditions and exact sequence in which the Drupal module hooks were invoked, so I took the API listing and wrote out the skeleton for each hook, sprinkling logging statements to capture and output the arguments passed to the hooks by Drupal.

This weekend I tackled coding up a Drupal feature I’ve been sorely missing on many a past project: static page caching. My yet-to-be-named module is a replacement for Drupal 4.7’s built-in caching. Instead of storing the pre-generated cached pages in the database, the module stores them in a cache directory on the file system.

Big deal, right? Actually, as I’ll demonstrate below, it makes all the difference.