Hooks - Blogs and Mental Health Care

It seems I'm surrounded by hooks. VanDyk's Pro Drupal book is chock-full of them, so too Ruby (and Rails?).

Sitting and listening to a couple of clients in particular I'm busy trying to locate the hooks:

• those I need to avoid (get one of these stuck in your lip and you'll end up talking gibberish);
• those I need to find as ways to move 'things' forward.

So, health care and programming are worlds apart?: don't you believe it!

The book I've to review has arrived Mercer's Drupal 6. I've Drupal 6.2 installed and having been exploring Netbeans and JRuby it's time to revisit the future site c/o Drupal.

Without direct comparison so far the text seems to follow the format of Mercer's previous Drupal 4.7 text. The explanation about Drupal menus - primary and secondary links is really helpful, I'll check this out this week. I've come to the conclusion that Hodges' model needs a forum, encouraged by Mercer's discussion of user roles, permissions and the need to provide a hub for a h2cm community. I've started to map the forum out having also settled on an existing theme. I'd like to avoid the usual 'nursing' forum categories, but this may be difficult. The existing subdivisions are not accidental, so would forums on holistic care and domain specific care be feasible? A key aim is to demonstrate how Hodges' model can also be applied in social care, informatics, education and other fields.

My exposure to NetBeans this past week has highlighted a need to (finally) read about MySQL which is essential for Drupal too. Reading the jQuery book makes a specific glossary page seem redundant, we'll see.

The idea of a community made me think about a conceptual currency - something concrete to help drive development and interchange. About 7-8 years ago when XML was emerging I'd wondered about creating an XML format for Hodges' model. I may still have the e-mails from a couple of people who were interested in this. There was even a web page that included mention of HCML - health career markup language.

In light of this I suppose my latching on to the development of domain specific languages is no surprise. XML has its limitations, but it would be brilliant to have a 'standard' template, a file format for Hodges' model upon which to place key care concepts. I suppose a Word document will suffice for now, but I do believe that much more is possible: hooked indeed. ...