Drupal quickies, May 2005

This is a summary of what the developers are working since Dries has opened the new developer tree on Apr 7, 2005. I presume that you are familiar with Drupal 4.6, I'll list only the major news. This does not mean we discredit those who have fixed bugs, improved help texts and so on, but this newsletter can't include all the changes.

• The first big change is the addition of folksonomy support by Morbus Iff. When you are editing a node, you can enter comma separated tags. Simple and effective. You can enable free tagging per vocabulary. For folksonomy vocabularies a pager is added. It is under consideration that this pager should be used for "big" normal vocabularies as well.
• jeremy@kerneltrap.org introduced loose caching. For highly dynamic sites the existing cache mechanism is not performing well. Loose caching keeps caching pages except for specific users who have submitted changes to the site. This means the cache can be used for a couple minutes more, while users still see their own changes reflected immediately. It seems that there are issues and we need locking to make this perfect.
• Nedjo added an author information block.
• Steven improved the auto-linebreak filter to ignore the contents of <script> and <style> This makes it easier to use JavaScript (e.g. Google AdSense) blocks. For 4.6 as well
• Dries and chx added a site-wide contact form (as seen on http://drupal.org/contact) to contact module.
• Jose A Reyero reworked the 'request new password' functionality. Drupal now sends a one-time usable URL which lets you log in and change the password.
• The queue module has been moved into contrib.
• chx has centralized print theme page calls. This lets you put the output of any Drupal call into a block. Several pages turned out to be totally empty after this, but it seems fixed by now.
• Stefan and TDobes has made status messages and help themeable.
• chx has changed the block configure page based on ideas from Dries. Now you can use PHP code to define pages where a block is visible. Node type constraint is gone.
• Last but not least, XTemplate engine has been moved to contrib and now PHPTemplate is the default. All hail Adrian for PHPtemplate. Gordon ported Bluemarine and has written a port guide.

Stay tuned for more improvements:

• Blocks everywhere on the page, not just left and right.
• Installation system.
• Revisions moved to a separate table. Speaking of revisions, check Moshe Weitzman's diff module in contrib, it's really nice.
• Grants based on taxonomy. And an UI to the grant system.
• CCK.

... and lot more to come!