I noticed on the Drupal development mailing list, that Drupal 7 has some significant changes for file handling. From Angie Byron (webchick): I just rolled the second in the series of Drupal 7 unstable releases for developers (see http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-October/031094.html for more info). Among the highlights this release are: * Several awesome File API improvements. Files are now "first-class objects" like nodes and users are, the API has been dramatically cleaned up for better consistency, AND there are a slew of new hooks like hook_file_load() and hook_file_validate() for contrib modules to react to when stuff happens to files. This is a great enabler for some awesome stuff in core like image handling and document management. See http://api.drupal.org/api/search/7/hook_file for more info. A HUGE shout-out to Andrew Morton (drewish) for sticking with this patch throughout its long, LONG development cycle. :) This is great to hear. I wonder how it will affect modules who have heavy file management like media_mover. How does this improve image handling in Drupal? Do we still need modules like image? Hmmm. Another interesting note is that making major changes to Drupal requires a large amount of dedication and campaign work to have those changes accepted. Notice how Angie points out Andrew Morton's effort here. Larry Garfield's talk about changing the database layer at Drupalcon Szeged had a similar feel to it. I take this as a sign of encouragement. If you have good ideas, you need to stick with them and promote them to the community. Change isn't always as fast as we want it to be, but it's possible and with such scrutiny can be more easily accepted when implemented.