Since the previous status update, there have been a number of additional improvements, including:

  1. Numerous installer improvements, including the ability to import translations for enabled modules automatically in the installer and the ability to specify numerous settings at install time (administrator (user number 1) credentials, clean URLs, timezone).
  2. Automatically importing translation files for modules and themes, when installing modules or enabling themes, as well as when adding a new language.
  3. Numerous usability improvements, including various installer improvements, the ability to remember anonymous comment posters, etc. It's great to see that the mega usability thread yielded some good patches.
  4. The user status module and the HTML corrector module are now in core.
  5. A vastly improved file management system, which associates files with users rather than nodes, so that files can be re-used among posts and various preview bugs are taken care of.
  6. A completely reworked database abstraction layer for table creation. This makes it far easier to port Drupal to other database backends, such as Oracle and SQLite.
  7. A JavaScript aggregator to complement the CSS aggregator feature in Drupal 5.
  8. Right-to-left (RTL) CSS files for built-in modules, so themes supporting right-to-left displays can work easily with Drupal 6. RTL CSS support for some built-in themes is already done.

Due to the exciting developments in the past four weeks and the rapid pace that the developers are currently funneling in those improvements, I have decided to extend the code freeze until July 1, 2007. This way, the current waves of innovation won't be stifled, and it will help give us another four weeks to put in even more great improvements.

The following are areas of particular interest to the core maintainers and will receive our top priority when reviewing:

  • Usability patches that help lower the Drupal learning curve and make it easier for site administrators to do their jobs are crucial. I'd like to see us pay more attention to this! Check this thread if you're looking for things to work on ...
  • Internationalization patches. This is a killer feature for Drupal 6, and we want it to really shine. If you care about Drupal's internationalization features, please take part in the testing and reviewing of Drupal's i18n patches.
  • Patches that improve performance of Drupal get very high priority.
  • Fixes and improvements to the Form API and menu system are likewise very important, as they affect all of core.
  • Important new features, such as getting the actions module, the module update notification module, the OpenID client module or the outliner into core. Also, I'm still hopeful that we can get some CCK improvements into core but so far that hasn't happened yet.

If you're interested in helping with these efforts to make Drupal 6 the best release yet, please see the patch spotlight for more detailed information on how you can help and which specific patches to focus on.

Keep in mind that we don't release a new major Drupal version very often. Features or improvements that don't make it into Drupal 6, might have to wait 9 months or more before they can make it into core.

Comments

Cool_Goose’s picture

First :P
Anyway these are great news :D.
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Be Smart, Think Free, Choose OpenSource.

MacRonin’s picture

Sounds like significant progress is being made.

+1 for extending the freeze date. There were a bunch of items(I am interested in) that were almost ready. This might be enough to get them ready for D6. when coders are on the jazz its best to let momentum flow. :-)

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mfer’s picture

The security crazy part of me is looking forward to http://drupal.org/node/143026.

--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com

themegarden.org’s picture

Even I'm very impatient and awaiting new version and cool new features, I totally agree with decision to extend the freeze date.

Nice to see such progress. I'm hoping that openID will be included in Drupal 6.

I'm wondering, where can I find more details about new drupal (6) theming system?

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Drupal Themes Live Preview - themegarden.org

soupp’s picture

Themeing is extremely important. Hope there will be no drastic changes PHPTemplate. Theme upgrade from 4.6-4.7 to 5.x was quite nice and easy.

Drupal Top Sites | Drupal Sites Directory

Leeteq’s picture

.
--
( Evaluating the long-term route for Drupal 7.x via BackdropCMS at https://www.CMX.zone )

mbria’s picture

I'm really impressed how fast development is going. Great job guys !! This is really amazing.
I feel very proud of been part (a little part) of this marvelous community.

From love, let me give you general feedback about how things are going. This is just the perspective of a site administrator, that sometimes scratches some code... and some points aren't directly related with Drupal's development:

I need to say that I'm sooo happy i18n have been finally included in core. It was a "must be" module for multilingual sites... and it means some big sites with users from different countries. I have been using it during last years and I can say reyero made a really good job so including i18n in core will be an important feature for those newbies that still doubt between Drupal and other CMSs but also the best way to be sure that every module developer will take in consideration that not all sites are in just in English.

Some other improvements in 6 are also concerned about multiligual, so thanks a looot to make easier the life of those that deal with more than one languages at the same time.

About new releases, let me clarify that I'm not a fanatic of "fireworks" or impressive frontends but we need to recognize that AJAX is helping a lot to simplify the interaction so it could be a nice area to continue in future. Nice work was done on 5.x but sorting elements or avoid full page refreshing it's something that won't be difficult to implement (now that we have jQuery) and will help newcomers to face Drupal with a big simile in their face.

We all are friends of Joomla. They are doing a great job and opening doors for those that want to work with Free CMS (or Open CMS, what you prefer) so IMHO I think we need to learn a couple of lessons from their work (as they need to learn from Drupal).

Joomla template system is, from the final user's point of view, more flexible in positioning. I know 4.7 improved this accepting "Multiple Block Regions" but may be it's time to accept columns or "user defined areas" in the official theme to clarify how to work with it.

The other point I noticed Joomla is doing things really well is in design... but not the architecture design (where Drupal is better by far) just the aesthetics and "merchandising" one. Garland was a good steep in this sense, and new improvements (as the JS aggregator) opens the door for designers (ccs toggling?) but I think we need a little bit more "look" creating modern templates to seduce new users. May be Drupal's association could also help in this, may be we all can contribute to contract a designer to create some new themes... But it's something we need if we want to keep on the top of the "CMS world" because (although it could be a little sad) most users decide their CMS depending on the available themes.

When I talk about "merchandising" I didn't took the right word (as you noticed English is not my mother tongue). I could say "usability", or "easiness", or... I don't know, but I like a lot how other CMS let their community test core and contrib modules to decide if it's something valuable for their sites and how they can be informed about new releases. This is not as clear an clean with drupal, where only a very few of the modules include a demo and it's difficult for newcomers to find a RSS to keep informed about new releases.

Since some time ago there are a couple of modules that took a lot of relevance. Yes, I'm talking about CCK and Views that are a present for those that don't have enough development skills to create a module but like to extend nodes in ways it's impossible to preview. IMHO the smartest idea in drupal is understanding everything as a node... at least, everything is content, so don't you think that Views also earned a place to be an official Drupal's node.

Just to close this general feedback I know that recently a lot of people is concerned about drupal as a DMS (nice SoC projects on this line) and also me, so the improvements in file management will be really useful for we all... but, did you take in consideration the work done by WebFM people? I recognize I didn't expect much at the beginning (no offense to them, it's just that I'm very skeptic with contrib modules) but I need to say that I worth a test for next release or so. Their interface is clean an easy and code looks quite standard so please, take a look.

I know that tomorrow I will notice that I missed a lot to say, but most important points are here.

Just let me close this post with admiration and gratitude for all those that changed the way I'm working (and it means an important part of my live), opening a marvelous piece of software that I won't never be tired of admire and play with. Thanks a lot !!

Keep roling, please...

Yours,

m.

GoofyX’s picture

Thumbs up for the code freeze extension!

mbria and I seem to share similar thoughts. Garland was a really nice addition to Drupal 5, but I think it still does not cause any "wow!" for a newbie user, which is something that Joomla seems to do in the first place. A little bit more work in the presentation area would surely help. A more polished default theme would be more appealing for new users. Let's face the fact that when a new user looks up a CMS for his/her site, he/she would be more interested in Joomla than Drupal, because the first impression (which is the user interface, the look) is what he/she first gets.

So, what I would like to see in v. 6 is a more polished, modern (or new, whatever suits you best) default Drupal theme and maybe a few more blocks enabled, which is part of the "bells-and-whistles" game. Maybe it's time to drop some of the old themes, like bluemarine, chameleon, etc.? Remember that these actions would be to the direction of the Drupal "marketing" and more people being aware of it.

Anyway, keep up the great work!
--
... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...

--
... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...

mbria’s picture

As a webdeveloper I usually disable my firefox's cache... and it used to be a good practice, but with last drupal 5.x I noticed this is quite harmful.

On a page that takes 3 seconds to load, when I enable some modules that apply JS extensively enabled (for instance: collapsible blocks, tinymce...) and modules that include new CSS every resource need to be requested again and each page took me from 15 to 30 seconds to refresh.

The point it's that a quite normal installation includes 15 separate CSS and 7 JS files and all of them are downloaded uncompressed and uncompacted.

I won't annoy if I thought this is just my personal issue... the point it's that I can imagine quite a lot of situations where this could happen and anyway there is a solution to fix it and improve Drupal performance.

Do you think could be nice to merge CSS or/and JS in future releases, for instance as described here?

http://www.ejeliot.com/blog/72

As you will preview, with jQuery and new CSS themes, looks like JS and CSS includes will grow in future.

ChrisKennedy’s picture

CSS aggregation is already available in Drupal 5, and Drupal 6 will add JS aggregation.

mbria’s picture

Happily, too much stuff on every new version :-P
Thanks to point. I missed this improvement.

Same with JS?

Cheers,

m.

mfer’s picture

It's called preprocessing. The settings are in /admin/settings/performance

In drupal 5 there is CSS preprocessing. In drupal 6 there will be CSS and JS preprocessing.

--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com

mbria’s picture

Thanks for the information and sorry for the noise.

Good work guys, really good work... I won't be able to play with it because "private downloads" is mandatory on my sites, but it's funny and joyful to see that every thing I can suggest was took in consideration by you before. :-P

No more comments. ;-)
Just congratulations and full support to your work.

See you in Barcelona.

amusis01’s picture

m, I agree with you, but if anything, I think you understate the importance of an attractive UI.

At the end of the day, and what too many people forget (being developers & not creators) is that the whole point of a CMS is not to produce pretty code, but to give ordinary people a way to publish their ideas. The front end, UI, whatever you call it, is all important. It's like a car- sure, some people go gaga about engine capacity, torque and acceleration. Most people however, just want a car that looks really nice, and is easy and pleasurable to drive. Similarly, I don't care about code or file structure, or what's under the Drupal hood. I just want a CMS that looks really nice and is easy and pleasurable to create content with.

In choosing a CMS, I tried many, and as soon as I saw Joomla, I was hooked (I abandoned Wordpress after many months, because it's impossible to customise if you didn't receive PHP with your mother's milk). The Joomla dashboard is simple, intuitive, and pure eye candy. There's nothing to figure out (what part of a big, colorful 'create new content' button don't you understand?). It comes with a WYSIWYG editor out of the box, which using a car as an analogy, is the steering wheel- the most important thing from the driver's perspective.

I had tried Drupal before looking at Joomla, and hated the bare, boring look with the endless nested menus. However, Joomla soon started to annoy me. It is heavy and slow. My site got hacked. The image upload/insert function is horrendous. I hate that it doesn't come with a forum or commenting out of the box. Installing these plug-ins is an annoyance for non-geeks, and they only make it run even slower. I dumped Joomla.

Eye candy isn't everything, I told myself, and resumed my search. Eventually, I came back to Drupal, as I saw to my delight that it comes with a forum and comments out of the box. It responds quickly and feels 'light' and stable. So what if the UI is boring and old-fashioned looking (web 2.0 apps today are all about eye-candy, pretty round-corner icons and ease of use)? It works, I said. Then I ran into every non-geek's Drupal nightmare: the absence of a WYSIWYG editor and the image upload/insert that is as bad as Joomla's. I am on the verge of switching to e.107. It also has forums and comments out of the box, and a nicer UI than Drupal. It just unfortunately doesn't feel as robust, light, fast and solid.

In summary, Drupal needs to focus more on the actual user, not the webmaster or developer. This means more emphasis on UI design (isn't it time tabs replaced the drop-down menu structure?). The benchmark should be Six Apart's Vox. I could literally lick that beautiful editing UI with my tongue. At this point, I'm still undecided, and searching.

mfer’s picture

You make some very good points and drupal is really moving in the more user friendly direction.

Now, with drupal not everything is in core. For example WYSIWYG isn't in core and neither is image uploading. There is a good reason for that. Some people don't want them and the ones that do aren't in agreement over which one. So, they are contributed modules and you can pick and choose the ones you want.

Drupal can be used to architect many websites and is very very flexible. I've seen blogs, brochure websites, community websites, graphical web apps, data driven web apps, and so many other things. You can use it to make your standard websites or go in entirely different directions. The drupal core is the start for all of that with added contributed modules to extend it in different directions. Many of the best contributed modules are by the same people writing features into core.

In your case I would recommend grabbing the TinyMCE module and the IMCE module. That should handle your WYSIWYG and image uploading problems.

I think, when it comes to drupal, there are 2 users to think about. There are the users who build sites and then there are the end users who will use those sites when they are up and running. My impression is that joomla and others like it concentrate on being pretty ready to go for that final end user out of the box. Problem is, to do this they sacrifice flexibility. Drupal doesn't do everything out of the box but that's because it can be used to build so many things. I think drupals forcus is a little more on the user of drupal who builds sites and web apps. It lets them be flexible and creative.

Drupal is on track to have distributions and I think that will be more what you are talking about. You can have a drupal for bloggers that has all you need right out of the box. Or, a community site drupal that has what you need out of the box. Or, what ever users come up with. The idea is to keep the flexibility while offering people what they need and are looking for. At this point it's about install profiles. Once those get nailed down it's on to distributions.

So, I think drupal is moving in that direction. Just not doing it the same way that joomla and others have before. Drupal seems to be on track to be able to retain it's flexibility and freedom for developers while still being able to provide direct products for non-devs.

--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com

harking’s picture

I am pleased to hear that time is being put into the file management area of Drupal.

While Drupal does a great job of managing other types of content, managing files is still an issue.

Keep up the good work everyone!

GiorgosK’s picture

Wow this is great news, code freeze in less than a month,
Soon the release I hope ;)

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GiorgosK
Geoland Web development/design part of the world experts network

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GiorgosK
Web Development

drupalnesia’s picture

D6:
- still need FTP to upload module or theme?
- still have no built in extract utility like Mambo/Joomla?

If above both feature available then we can avoid use FTP or CPanel-File Manager.

Also, maybe you can add "Create Database" rather than manually create the DB using PHPMyAdmin. And, IMHO, I like bluemarine theme because Garland too pale and has many bugs.

Viva Drupal 6!

GoofyX’s picture

Yes, it's sometimes a bit annoying to have to manually create the database first, but it would also seem reasonable to do this yourself. That's because most hosting providers do not provide the ability to create a database yourself from MySQL's root account. They usually have a custom create database option either from a control panel, or from inside phpmyadmin itself. Surely an option would be nice here, e.g. 1) I have created the database myself and here are the credentials, and 2) create it yourself, here is the root password.

As for Garland, it would seem reasonable to expect some bugs, since it's new and probably has not been fully tested in all availables OSes and browsers...
--
... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...

--
... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...

webchick’s picture

Anyone can test the newest release of Drupal by downloading the 6.x-dev tarball here: http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-6.x-dev.tar.gz and witness first-hand what features are/are not included yet.

If you have specific feature requests for Drupal 6 (or bugs as you're going through), you should search first and, if not found, submit an issue.

You can also contribute to development, and take an active role in helping make Drupal 6 contain all the cool stuff you want it to. :D

jsimonis’s picture

Thanks for the link. While I'm not much of a coder (as far as modules go), I can help with testing things. I just downloaded 6.x-dev and will install it on my server and play around with it.

I'll be sure to post any problems I run into.

--
Jenni S.
http://www.nu-look.net
Portland, OR metro area
Contact Me

jsimonis’s picture

I'm just working on getting the 6.x dev installed now.

I like how it asks right up front whether you're doing it in English or need another language.

And I like the additional set-up options - name of site, e-mail address, setting up admin account, time zone, clean urls, etc. It even picked up my time zone so I don't have to try to remember if we're -7 or -8 right now. ; )

I think I'm going to have fun playing with this version.

--
Jenni S.
http://www.nu-look.net
Portland, OR metro area
Contact Me

Sharique’s picture

means more faster, solid and more features.
--
Sharique uddin Ahmed Farooqui
IT head, Managefolio.com

Sharique Ahmed Farooqui
http://www.openahmed.com

Gman’s picture

Thanks again for the updates, and the decision to keep development rolling. Glad to see there are so many new features making their way in to D6.

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Blog
Trouvé Media

erdem-2’s picture

This is really great news!
Thank you keeping us informed about the status.

cpelham’s picture

Keeping up with this problem is tough since there are seemingly so many contributing factors and proposed solutions. But it seems to me to be one of the very very top problems that need to be corrected. so many of our users use our site less than they would like because they tire of having to log in over and over before a login sticks. but it's hard to pin down. and i rarely experience it myself...whatever...lots of drupal installs seem to suffer from it to varying degrees and it's a huge black eye regardless of the cause. do we think there is a final solution in sight?

—————————

Christopher Pelham
Director
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing)
123 4th Ave, 2nd FL
New York, NY 10003
212-677-8621
www.crsny.org

mfer’s picture

What issue are you talking about? You might want to do a search for issues that deal with this and see if there is a solution already or one being discussed for your problem. This isn't the place to track an issue or find a solution (which is what we really want). If you don't find an issue that deals with your problem please file a bug report with a lot of detail (php version, mysql version, drupal version, other login modules installed, browsers having the problem in, etc.).

--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com

cpelham’s picture

I have followed threads about login difficulties at great length, and to no avail. The symptom is that when someone types in his login info and then clicks the button or presses enter, then the page simply reloads, as if he hasn't logged in at all. there is no error message to trouble shoot. Lots of various theories and fixes have been offered, but they haven't eliminated all occurrances of this on again, off again problem. it is not limited to specific installations or platforms or web browsers. some people sometimes cannot log in to drupal.org. it is hard to know what to file an issue under, without knowing the cause of the issue. do you see my point and why i am bringing it up here? user login as a feature is crippled until this is resolved. and that's a feature many sites need.

it may be a problem with cookies rather than with drupal or with the timing of drupal's interaction with cookies or somethink like that. it's hard to say what is the source of the problem. or whether there is one source or numerous sources that affect different people at different times.

the bottom line is that no everyone can consistently log in. and if users cannot log in, then they cannot partake of user only features and content, which is a BIG problem for any site that has registered-user-only features and content.

if this gets solved one way or another, then Drupal becomes a lot more professional and usable.

—————————

Christopher Pelham
Director
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing)
123 4th Ave, 2nd FL
New York, NY 10003
212-677-8621
www.crsny.org

mfer’s picture

This conversation is lost if it doesn't end up in an issue. Either a new one or reopening an old one. In any case it would be good to track this down. With so many browsers and servers there are bound to be issues.

Personally, I have never had any of these on any config I have setup so I am no help here. But, please use issues to follow up on this or your efforts will be lost. That's the right place to work out these things.

--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com

jsimonis’s picture

Yes, I'll be glad when we figure out what is causing that. It's been a big hassle, and we have yet to figure out what's causing it. Especially since there isn't a log item for the problem.

--
Jenni S.
http://www.nu-look.net
Portland, OR metro area
Contact Me

Nigeria’s picture

I think that the functionality in LoginTobbogan that allows you to login with an email address OR your user id should be in core, together with the functionality of loginmenu that provides a login link on the navigation block.

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Ade Atobatele

Ade Atobatele

mfer’s picture

Have you submitted an issue asking for this? Or, is there an existing issue? If an issue doesn't exist than submit one asking for this new feature and see where it goes.

Please remember that core isn't where all functionality belongs. Some things are on faster development cycles than core or are things that are rarely used. Personally, I don't have an opinion on this but the conversation is worth having.... in an issue thread.

--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com

ecujak’s picture

Will the 6.x release include a new(or greatly improved) default Forum and Image gallery? This is my only beef with drupal so far. I love everything else but would like to know if this is going to be improved upon.

If these will be improved I will not have to write my own Gallery and Forum. As is now with what I have to work with the past Image and Forum module, I will have to write my own to aid my site users with ease of use and aesthetics.

better phpBB and Gallery2 integration would be nice.

Keep up the good work.
JaK

mfer’s picture

There is a group working on the forum tasks. Not sure of their status. The group is at http://groups.drupal.org/drubb.

There is, also, flatforum (find this in themes not modules) that can turn the existing drupal forum into a standard flat forum. Or, there are modules like http://drupal.org/project/uieforum.

As for images, are you looking for a way to do custom image galleries? Or are you talking about features for each image at the node level? Creating custom galleries is pretty easy to do with views and you can customize them however you want.

--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com

dan33’s picture

Image gallery isn't really needed. You can theme pages however you like, making your own custom galleries.

I can agree with the forums needing some spicing up, however I've found that most of my issues lie with how its themed by default. It's a lot of work to go in and create your own custom theming for forum looks. Perhaps we could get a new default forum theme to look more like a "traditional" forum.

Why is phpBB and/or Gallery2 integration needed? Drupal has a forum, although limited, and you can create an image gallery with Drupal rather easily by just using image.module. I'd much rather see the forums in Drupal improved than over better integration with other open source software.

erdem-2’s picture

I agree there should be a solution for forum module in the drupal.
It can be removed or updated.

As it seems its not going to be improved soon ( i assume that :) ) there can be an integration solution for forum. phpBB would be a great solution for drupal.

By providing an integration gateway (may be) we can integrate other softwares with drupal.

coofercat’s picture

I've been playing around with a checkout of Drupal 6 to see if some FAPI issues were still present - thankfully they're not. FAPI looks completely different, and it seems all the 'edge' cases have been hoovered up along the way, which is great news (I'm enjoying the 'form_state' arrangement, and the provision of 'storage' in it). I'm not looking forward to another module upgrade, as FAPI is different in some big (and some subtle) ways, but so far, it looks really good.

Top job on this, for everyone who worked on it. Awesome stuff...!

eaton’s picture

The vast majority of the FAPI changes in 6 -- for modules, at least -- are reshuffling of parameter order, and things like '$form_values is now in $form_state, so pull the array from there before using it.'

The complex edge cases (goofy multistep forms, etc) will definitely have to be reworked, but I think the new approach will be a MAJOR improvement, and will handle a lot more of the grunt work for developers. Simplifying the edge cases, and making the API more consistent, is really what this version's changes are all about.

--
Lullabot! | Eaton's blog | VotingAPI discussion

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Eaton — Partner at Autogram

keycoke’s picture

Please add Blog Theme (user can can change/select theme for their own blog) in the Drupal 6.
It's a must.... ;)

tignux’s picture

I quote drupalson. If we can have a swich theme for the Blog like wordpress would be great.

A big thanks to all developers.

|_0_|

erdem-2’s picture

I also quote drupalson. :)

Leeteq’s picture

+1 for such a feature in core.

I think such a feature should be sort of "generically API-ish", allowing the administrators to select which parts of the site should offer users of certain roles the option to enable a special themes.

I can imagine that this kind of feature could also allow content managers to for example set some color variations of the Garland theme for specific books and forums. Also relevant for image galleries, and if forums, books and galleries have their own dedicated ("hidden"?/administrative?) vocabulary, then the feature could allow certain theme (theme category?) this for specific roles or vocabularies.

If there was a way in themes such as the Garland theme to define new named color combinatins and call them, then the above could let privileged users select a specific "variant" of a theme, and the administrators would not need to upload a bunch of themes to provide variations for books, for example.

.
--
( Evaluating the long-term route for Drupal 7.x via BackdropCMS at https://www.CMX.zone )

drupalnesia’s picture

CauliflowerEars’s picture

Hi - I'm new to drupal and I've been all over the site and can't find an expected date for the new release. I'm itching to start a development in a matter of weeks and want to know if I should hold out for v6. Also if anyone could share their experience of previous releases, if they're anything like a microshaft release, they need 6 months to bed-in before they can be used off the shelf without major bug-fixes. I know drupal wont be as bad as M$ but seriously, should I be thinking of holding off a further month or 2 after the release to catch a few extra patches or can these generally be added without disruption to a new site development?
Cheers,
Paul

sepeck’s picture

I gave a recent presentation. One of my slides was 'should I develop for Drupal 6' and the answer was NO. If you follow Drupal HEAD development while developing your site in 5, then it's merely a matter of updating the areas that changed.

Traditionally the process goes.
Freeze date is set.
After freeze, NO new features are allowed in.
-Bug fix
-QA Testing
-Usability enhancement

Test test test. How long this process is depends on how many quality testers and quality feedback and reports we get back along with patches to correct issues found.

When there are no critical bugs found after some time, an Alpha release is rolled followed sometimes by a beta and or release candidate.

When the beta is released an announcement is generally made on the front page.

Note: There are no dates mentioned and none will ever be as the target time is when it's ready. The time line is subject to the available contributors contributing work.

It's spelled Microsoft.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

windcaller’s picture

I am new to CMS & Drupal and found this link for HEAD
http://drupal.org/handbook/version-info#HEAD
According to Drupal.org, "each new release of Drupal provides little or no backward compatibility."
as stated in http://drupal.org/node/65922.
Since I will be rolling a new web site using Drupal and was hoping to have the latest cutting edge version I will have to Use 5.xxx.
When the time comes to upgrade it is my hope that there will be plenty of documentation to do it. The first time is always the hardest. But everyone does it regularly it seems.
This node also states, "plan for periodic upgrades of their project to the latest major release (every 6-12 months) in order to benefit from the ongoing active support ..."

The problem here is that if the modules do not upgrade with the Drupal core and you have an un-upgraded module your web site is not going to work for the web site user who is used to that feature that your site is built around.

The question is how soon once the new Dropal version is released will the old be unsupported? Does it give time for the modules to be updated?

sepeck’s picture

HEAD is the development version. We do NOT want people using that to develop live sites so there is NO tracking or care that daily snapshots will be compatible with previous daily snapshots.

On that same page you should have seen that Drupal core ALWAYS provides a version migration path for your sites data. Contrib module generally do.

As to community support? See that very same page a little higher up under Is my version of Drupal supported?

How soon are contributed modules updated? Whenever the contrib module maintainers get around to it, need to do it, patches are contributed to help them or they are paid by their client who sponsored the module.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

erika’s picture

Great news ...
Eagerly waiting for the new release...
Hats of to u guys...

AutoInsurance Guy’s picture

Yeah we all certainly need to "live in the now" for the meantime - I'm not able to upgrade some of my sites to drupal5 yet, as some required modules are still in heavy development for compatability with 5. So I'm not even thinking about 6 yet, just looking forward to when I can get all my sites running 5!

drazzig’s picture

As stated in usability thread "apart from the obvious WYSIWYG editor". If this is so obvious how come this is not going to be included as part of the core in version 6.0, or is it? Every major CMS has this now and it is a usability issue for Drupal. I don't think we need to wait another 9 months for this feature do we?

www.davidgildeh.com

Boris Mann’s picture

As my subject says, there is no solid WYSIWYG editor that is core-worthy. Since we have jQuery in core, one built around jQuery is the likeliest to get in.

What does it need to get in? A champion or champions to select an editor, work out the best API to integrate it, and so on.

What can you do if you're not a developer? Start a bounty, research the available editors out there (they would need to be GPL or compatible), and note the pros and cons of each.

And, of course, it's relatively simple to create an install profile that includes WYSIWYG. See http://support.bryght.com/install-profiles/basic for a description of our Bryght Basic install profile for Drupal 5.

--
The future is Bryght.

mbria’s picture

Sorry to ask, but what is wrong with tiny? Just curious... because I checked quite every available GPL webeditor in the field and IMHO tiny is really good one and the drupal's integration module is simply great.

Is that isn't as tiny (too fat I mean) for drupal? Is because it's LGPL and need to be GPL?

Some time ago, with some fellows, we started a comparative of webeditors (focused on features) and tinyMCE was our choice:

http://eduforge.org/wiki/wiki/space4kids/wiki?pagename=%22Status%20of%20...
http://eduforge.org/wiki/wiki/space4kids/wiki?pagename=Comparative%20tab...

I'm dealing with tinyMCE every day in all my sites and (except for word's copy&pastes) it always worked like a charm.

I'm asking because we are thinking in a moodle-tinyMCE integration (instead of the ancient HTMLarea) and your comments made me think we are working on the wrong direction.

Thanks in advance.

Boris Mann’s picture

One of the main reasons is that yes, TinyMCE is "too fat". It certainly is my choice for WYSIWYG (best of a bad lot...), but I don't think it's appropriate for core inclusion either.

drupalnesia’s picture

Frankly, this is not a problem for me :) because I can create my own module to provide a wysiwyg editor for my site.

I think the most problem not include TinyMCE (or others) is not "too fat" or "too tiny" because the package smaller that 1 diskette :) and the TinyMCE code very stable (so will not get to much energy to maintenance it) and proven in word wide use ... instead it's LGPL state, right? Except Drupal core-team allow LPGL in their code. Look like another "chicken or egg" problem.

Eaton has create very clear understanding about this long issue: http://drupal.org/node/48185

Just my opinion.

mbria’s picture

Seams that we all agree that TinyMCE isn't as tiny at all, at least as is released by Moxie then... why not adding a retailed version?
I heard about a tinymce-lite but I didn't have any useful reference... anybody has news about this?

Second choice comes from the hand of the compression: The original code base is around 150KB... but could be 5KB if is sent gziped to the client.

How much does it need to weight to be took in consideration?
Where are drupal core developer's main concerns? Lag downloading 150KB or time to process it?

I suppose both :-) so my last suggestion is adding it disabled, letting newbies activate it just clicking a single checkbox.

IMHO at the end it's a question of balance... do you all think that now days is important for drupal to include wysiwyg editor "out-of-the-box" or we can still pass through this?

Cheers,

m.

jsimonis’s picture

While it may not seem that big, TinyMCE with all its required files is about 470 Kb as a .tar.gz file.

The entire Drupal 5.x download is 729 Kb.

I can see why people are hesitant to add a module to the core that is 64% of the size of the Drupal download file.

I just looked at one of my sites that has a lot of modules uploaded with it. The core modules directory is 1.28 MB in size. The TinyMCE folder (which is in sites/all/modules) is 2.51 MB all by itself. The only module folder that is bigger is the location module, and that's because of the included zipcode database file.

Maybe someone will come up with a profile or a package or whatever that is easy to download that automatically comes with a few non-core modules like TinyMCE. I've been trying to figure out how to do it myself, but my PHP knowledge is still in the beginner stages. For right now I just have a copy of Drupal with all the modules I use the most in my "skeleton" directory on my reseller hosting. Every account I create gets a copy of all those files.

I'm working on a "base" site right now where I'm doing all the settings that I typically use on all my sites. Then I'm going to download that sql file. Then from now on all I have to do is load that sql file, and all my basic set-up will be complete. That'll save me a few hours of poking around doing all those settings each time.

--
Jenni S.
http://www.nu-look.net
Portland, OR metro area
Contact Me

drupalnesia’s picture

Any update for CCK in Drupal core?

Leeteq’s picture

Ref. this small module:
http://drupal.org/project/body_revision
and the issue filed here:
http://drupal.org/node/124076

There is also a related feature request for the excellent revision moderation module that finally makes moderation make sense, that is depending on core supporting this:
http://drupal.org/node/124086

There are several such security related things that would seem appropriate for core to facilitate.

.
--
( Evaluating the long-term route for Drupal 7.x via BackdropCMS at https://www.CMX.zone )

Leeteq’s picture

Ref. "Better facilitation of user name changes (OpenID related too, perhaps)":
Files as feature request: http://drupal.org/node/153317

Plus a somewhat related comment in this OpenID thread:
http://drupal.org/node/152893#comment-244048

.
--
( Evaluating the long-term route for Drupal 7.x via BackdropCMS at https://www.CMX.zone )

Leeteq’s picture

Ref. this question/feature request:

"Dedicated teasers readable by anonymous, require access level to get to the rest of that content."
http://drupal.org/node/154349

(If this is possible already in Drupal 5, I would be happy to get a tip on what is needed.)

.
--
( Evaluating the long-term route for Drupal 7.x via BackdropCMS at https://www.CMX.zone )

Boris Mann’s picture

http://drupal.org/project/premium -- needs updating to D5.