Oct
30
(2006)
Trying out Drupal 5
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: drupal.
I just grabbed the latest CVS build of Drupal 5, to poke around and see what’s new. I’m really surprised and impressed at how far it’s come. Here are the big changes I’ve seen in about half an hour of playing with a new test site:
- New theme. Garland feels much more modern than Bluemarine. Nicely done.
- Revamped admin interface. It’s been reorganized by task and by module, making it easier to find where to modify a given setting. Much of the time spent administering a Drupal 4.7 site is wasted poking around the admin screens to find where a bit needs to be twiddled. “Is it in admin > content > content types? Or rather admin > settings > content types ? etc…” The new “Content Management,” “Site Building,” “Site Configuration,” “Logs,” and “Help” admin sections should make it much simpler to run a Drupal site.
- Tweaked page cache settings - not sure if the rumoured filesystem cache system is included here (is that the “aggressive - experts only” cache?)
- Includes a lite version of Content Construction Kit, making it easy to create simple content types (title + description/body). Why is that cool? Because you can assign different taxonomies and access controls to the various simple content types, so different users are able to create different types of content, classified differently. I’ll have to see what the potential issues may be with running the full CCK module for managing complex content types. Our new, soon-to-be-released TLC website makes extensive, obsessive use of several complex custom content types, so I’ll be spending some time checking this out.
- Separate “main” and admin themes. Instead of trying to shoehorn admin functions into a production custom theme, you can pimp out your site’s theme while retaining a fully functional admin theme. Yay.
- Lots of little improvements, making the admin interface more task-oriented. Things like the Clean URL setting have been moved into more appropriate spots, rather than dumping them all into One Giant Config Screen.
- Support for multiple image libraries. It was there in previous versions, but required adding a secret file to support Magick. I’ll have to install ImageMagick on my PowerBook again to try this out.
- Site installer. You still have to manually create the database, but Drupal will now install the tables and a default set of data automatically. I’ll have to play with the profiles feature to see how that might tie into the Provisionator.
I’m looking forward to the release of Drupal 5. I’ve got a LOT of compatibility testing to do before going live with it, though. I’ve got several sites running older versions of some modules, because the module versioning system is confusing enough that they break a little if updating them to “current” versions. That’s one area I’d really like to see get some loving. Tagging a module as “4.7″ and then making changes to it that break things depending on exactly which version of the 4.7 module you’re running (or have run). Very confusing and frustrating.
That’s one area I’d really like to see get some loving. Tagging a module as “4.7″ and then making changes to it that break things depending on exactly which version of the 4.7 module you’re running (or have run). Very confusing and frustrating.
This area is, in fact, getting a great deal of attention. Derek Wright is basically done with the coding and is doing testing and making sure everything is right; I’d say by end of November at the latest we’ll have a real release system in place, and modules will get *gasp* version numbers.
Hey D’Arcy,
I’m been having great fun poking around 5.0… The one thing about all of this that I”m not sure about is how upgrading CVSs works. Can i keep playing around and uploading new CVSs over and over again? I’m also loving the organic groups… or at least, I think I will once i understand how to use them better. We’d love to have you drop by the CMS Academy Drupal sessions sometime… (completely free, collaborative drupal learning community) http://www.cmsacademy.net/drupal/
cheers. dave.
I was just going to comment on the project module work, but then I saw that merlin had beaten me to it —
FWIW, some of the very cool features of the new 5.0 version (like the node access arbitrator) have been coded by merlin —
Also, D’arcy, have you seen the ACL module, or the nodeaccess modules? — both offer the beginning of user-determined access to nodes.
RE Dave’s question on cvs — overwrite the codebase, and run update.php, and you should be good to go. Or, if you want to get fully geeked out, set up a cvs repo, run your code from there, and upgrade periodically by syncing your codebase against the Drupal cvs repo.
Cheers,
Bill
Merlin - thanks for the clarification. That’s awesome. It will make working with various contributed modules much cleaner. Having modules with their own version numbers, and a compatible Drupal version reference (i.e., Organic Groups 2.3, compatible with Drupal 4.7, etc…) will be nice.
Dave - Bill’s got the answer. As long as the module developers carefully maintain the .install file, updating the code and running update.php will keep you good to go.
Bill - I’ve looked at NA Arbitrator and Nodeaccess, but haven’t seen ACL. I’ll check it out ASAP. Thanks!
The advice on CVS is almost right with two distinctions.
1. you don’t always need to run update.php, but that should be clear when you visit the page whether or not you need to do it.
2. upgrades are not supported between CVS revisions and definitely not in TRUNK-HEAD. If you are using a CVS head checkout from today and then update it in a week there may be changes that are in code, and in the new database.mysql file but which aren’t in an update. That’s just the nature of Drupal development. Doing otherwise would be overly restrictive.
That said, you’re tracking TRUNK-HEAD then you are likely savvy enough to fix any problems that you notice as a result of that, or you can drop in #drupal and ask other devs for help.