As a Drupal newbie, I am generally impressed how easy and straightforward the installation and management is for D6. That's why I am having a hard time to understand the odd default set-up of the 'files' directory.

When I first installed Drupal, almost everything went well right from the beginning, but I had to switch to the terminal in order to create the 'files' directory manually, and set the correct ownership/permission. The problem was easy to solve, as the web-interface told me exactly what to do.

But the question is: Why is this folder not present by default? Why does the user have to create it manually?

Later, when Drupal is set-up for multi-sites, the location of 'files' changes completely (Setup of /sites directory for multi-site). In that case, each site has it's own 'files' directory:

sites/example1.com/files
sites/example2.com/files

This looks like a sensible setup to me, since everything is grouped nicely together.

So the next question is: If this is a good setup, why is this not the default behavior? Why does the user have to change 'Site configuration > File system' manually for each site?

And if this is correct, why isn't 'files' located in 'sites/default/files' right from the beginning?

If there are good reasons for the actual behavior, then it would be nice to let the user know about them. So that he understands why he is doing this manually.

BTW, since I'm already talking about 'File system', I'm not sure about the use of 'Temporary directory'. Is this the same 'sites/example1.com/tmp' directory that is mentioned in Setup of /sites directory for multi-site?

Comments

keith.smith’s picture

keith.smith commented

There are several questions here, some of which I can't answer (because I don't know the answer).

On your first question though:

But the question is: Why is this folder not present by default? Why does the user have to create it manually?

For a brief period, the files folder was present in the installation package. However, the point was raised that during an upgrade, when using some GUI interfaces, the default behavior is to replace folders, if someone does a drag and drop. That created the possibility that someone would have a populated files directory that would be replaced by an empty files directory. leading to irretrievable data loss -- though everyone should have site backups, I can speak from personal experience that this is not always the case.

See the discussion at http://drupal.org/node/191310 especially around comment #46 or so.

jjalocha’s picture

jjalocha commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Thanks, Keith, your link led me to a whole lot of discussions I hadn't found before.

I think my issue is is a duplicate of User experience: Error for file folder not present during install felt wrong, so I will close this and move over there.

gpk’s picture

gpk commented
Status: Closed (fixed) » Closed (duplicate)

(nitpicking re. status for the avoidance of confusion!)