We are excited to announce that three key modules, Views, CCK, and Organic Groups, have published release candidates today, ready for testing. If you are interested in speeding the transition to a full release, install and test the Release Candidates (RC). Many months of work have gone into extensive rewrites of these modules, leading to major improvements that will make Drupal 6 an even more attractive platform for building websites.

As always, you should upgrade these modules on a test site first, and make sure to make a complete backup. You never know how your site's customizations will affect things, or what silly little thing nobody else caught.

IMPORTANT! There are a couple Drupal core bugs that could affect anyone using Views and anyone updating from an earlier version of CCK. They are fixed in the Drupal 6.3 release, please use that.

More details about these pivotal module releases follow...

Views 2

The Views module has undergone extensive development, refactoring, and testing. Views 2 improves the existing functionality of the Views module, and adds new features designed to simplify life for developers, site admins, themers, and end users alike.

Possibly the most important change is that Views can now create lists of anything: nodes, users, taxonomy -- you name it! Another large change you'll notice right off the bat is that the UI for Views has completely changed, and is full of JavaScripty goodness. While it may take some getting used to initially, we're confident that you'll find that the changes ultimately make creating views much easier than before.

A more detailed list of changes is below.

Views links

New features for end users

  • Multiple blocks, pages, and feeds per view.
  • Built-in AJAX for pagers, exposed filters, and argument drill-down clicks. Great in blocks!
  • RSS feeds for comments.
  • Greater control over exposed filters, including being able to reduce a taxonomy list to just terms you select.
  • Can have multiple "displays" on a view with the same path, which have different features -- give your administrators and privileged users richer views than others!

New features for themers

  • All views output is done through templates, dramatically improving themability; the old views theming wizard is no longer required .
  • Additional theming information to customize your views through templates is also provided in the user interface.

New features for site admins

  • A completely reworked UI for creating and maintaining views. Features of the UI include:
    • Options are presented contextually; thus, when editing/creating a view, you are presented with only the choices you need.
    • If two people are editing the same View the view will be locked; only one person can edit a view at a time.
    • Live preview! Make a change, scroll down and see what your view looks like.
    • Upon previewing, performance timers show how long your View took to build, query, and render. Great for quick performance tuning.
  • Views can pull data from many different core tables. Users, comments, statistics, files, plus other things can be plugged in.
  • Can have views within views, known as attachments. These attachments can be used to display multiple, related views within the same space.
  • "View type" is now called "style", and has split into Style and Row style to allow far more flexibility in how view results are displayed. We've also added useful styles such as grouping and grid.
  • Lots inline help with the Advanced Help module.
  • New "Relationships" can let you have all the fields from referenced nodes right in your view.
  • New glossary styles make it easy to page items alphabetically.
  • Pluggable mechanism to find values for arguments for blocks -- easily create views for the node or user page with no PHP snippets required.
  • Views now have optional tags in addition to names; allowing you to sort your list of views and find and edit the ones for which you're looking.
  • Export multiple Views at once.
  • Tool to analyze your view for common mistakes (that can be expanded through plugins)

New Features for developers

  • Reworked, pluggable object-oriented API. Every component of Views is implemented as plugin objects and handlers. Views developers now have a great deal of freedom extending and customizing Views with their own data tables, display types, and view and row style plugins.
  • Pluggable argument validation (can embed PHP code) to give you greater control over what kind of arguments your views can use.
  • The SQL statements used to generate a view are displayed on preview.

Technical details, and known bugs

  1. There are a couple of bugs in Drupal 6.2 that are fixed in Drupal 6.x-dev that make it very important that Drupal 6.x-dev is used (or, when it comes out, Drupal 6.3).
  2. If you find yourself having troubles with the JavaScript (there are a few people who report problems that we can't figure out yet) the JavaScript part can be completely turned off and the UI largely works without it, though a couple of places (arguments, in particular) may be a little rough.
  3. The upgrade path from 1 to 2 is going to take some manual work to convert your Views to the new format. Views2 contains a Views1 conversion tool, but existing views will likely need some additional work to function in Views2
  4. Urgent request! We need some help with the documentation, both editing the existing pages, finishing some of the TODO items, and fleshing it out more so that it is more cohesive!

In using and testing the Release Candidate, if you find what appears to be a bug, browse and/or search the issue queue to see if someone else has reported a similar issue. If you have found something new, please file a new issue.


Content Construction Kit - CCK 2

CCK has been significantly reworked for Drupal 6, both to add new functionality and to integrate into the new Views 2 code.

CCK Links

New Features

  • New ajax 'Add more' button that the user can click as many times as they like to add the right number of values for multiple value fields.
  • The Manage Fields screen now uses drag 'n drop to make it easy to re-organize fields and fieldgroups.
  • The Manage Fields screen now lets you re-arrange non-CCK "fields", like the title and body, as well as CCK fields. A hook is available for modules that want to have their own node form elements benefit from this.
  • Numerous usability improvements have been incorporated based on feedback from the usability testing at the University of Minnesota.
  • A new API has been added to make it easier to create and populate fields from custom modules and profiles.
  • A new Content Permissions module included in the CCK package lets you control access to individual fields.
  • CCK now integrates with the Devel Generate module. Core CCK fields and any other CCK fields that implement the content_generate() hook will add random valid field values to the generated nodes.
  • New formatters can format either a single field value or all the multiple values of a field. Custom modules could use this to display field values in a map or chart.

CCK / Views 2 Integration

As always, CCK has automatic, built-in Views integration for all CCK fields. Two new features for Views 2 include:

  • Add a 'relationship' to a view using a nodereference or userreference field, then add any field, sort, filter, or argument from the referenced node or user to the view (just indicate it is coming from the relationship instead of the original node).
  • Views filters now include 'empty/not empty' options.

Known Problems and Bugs

Upgrade from D5

  • Many of the older updates have been removed from the code, so you need to get current on the D5 version before upgrading to the D6 version, or you may get messages about missing updates.
  • There are still some sporadic upgrade problems.

So *please* be sure to make a backup copy of your database before upgrading to the D6 version.


Organic Groups

Organic Groups links

Compared to Views and CCK, Organic groups received less of an overhaul for Drupal 6. Most of the changes are straightforward improvements which take advantage of new features in core and Views. A few major highlights:

  • Member listings powered by Views. Anytime you want to list the members of group(s), you may use standard Views user listings to do so. So you can now list all members who have a given profile field or all members who are group admins and so on. All the power you are used to for making lists of group nodes and group posts now extends to users. For example, the Faces tab in each group is now powered by a View which uses the 'grid' style.
  • More Views fields such as the number of members and posts in a given group.
  • The current group (if any) is exposed to javascript code. This means you can easily target advertisements or track analytics by organic group.
  • Theming groups has become easier as we now ship a template which is for all groups by default. No need to move it to your theme directory unless you want to make further changes.
  • Developers who use Devel Generate module along with OG can now generate group nodes and group posts that have proper OG behavior.
  • Groups now have an optional 'Group files' block which lists all uploads in the group.

Known issues

  • Email notification functionality is broken. I expect to replace it with og_notifications module.
  • OG Panels is not available because panels module has not yet ported to Drupal 6.

Comments

dmitrig01’s picture

These new releases are great, and I can't wait to begin using these key modules.

I think Drupal 6 will now be much more popular :).

[Drupal++]

BioALIEN’s picture

The two biggest Drupal modules reaching this stage is surely music to everyone's ears.

Major kudos to all contributors. Keep up the great work.

---
Dee
iScene Interactive :: iScene.eu

beeradb’s picture

Awesome news. Thanks for all the hard work you guys have put in.

budda’s picture

Ah, great stuff! The news I've been sitting and waiting to hear for months. Woo

--
Ixis (UK): Drupal consultancy, Drupal hosting.

thomasmeadows’s picture

OG needs panels to run. There is currently no panels 6.x ~_~ What do I do?

merlinofchaos’s picture

Hardly. OG's been around for, 3-4 years. og_panels has existed for, what. 6 months? Less, I think.

-- Merlin

[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

-- Merlin

[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

BioALIEN’s picture

If you want proof, just try to install OG and see that it has no dependencies with Panels.module when you visit the Modules page.

On another note, I do agree that Panels is sorely missed from this news item.

---
Dee
iScene Interactive :: iScene.eu

stephthegeek’s picture

*squeals with excitement*

What wonderful news! Thank you for all your hard work! Drupal just keeps getting better. So many of these things are going to make building sites way easier for new users and non-programmers. Not to mention make all our lives all that much more pleasant :)

---
{ TopNotchThemes } Gorgeous 100% original Drupal themes with Views/Panels 2 support, plus Ubercart themes!

Crell’s picture

Totally awesome! The tier-1 contrib modules all seemed to get major rewrites for D6, which has taken a long time but having been working with betas it is definitely worth it. The Dynamic Drupal Duo of Views and CCK are what makes building Drupal sites so slick, and changes both subtle and not (wait, Views 2 had subtle changes?) make it even slicker.

There's still a few CCK field modules that need to catch up before my "standard kit" is D6-ready, but I'd say Drupal 6 has now arrived. For real. :-) (Well, it will when 6.3 is released and fixes the theme bugs that break Views...)

Great work, Earl, Karen, Yves, Moshe, and everyone else involved!

--
Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog
http://www.palantir.net

--
Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/
Thinking Functionally in PHP: https://leanpub.com/thinking-functionally-in-php

uzbekjon’s picture

Exactly !!!

Now, users start migrating to Drupal 6... Finally...

great job guys...

-------------------------------
Sites for uzbeks and Uzbekistan:
Uzbek Lyrics Database
Uzbekistan Forum

bonobo’s picture

This totally rocks -- thanks to all of you for the work you have put into getting these modules out the door.

Cheers,

Bill

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

Santa Claus’s picture

Great news! Thanks for this modules!

mo6’s picture

Great stuff! Please include these modules in core, so that we won't have to wait for serious deployment with the release of Drupal 7. Thanks guys, for the great effort.

marcvangend’s picture

I too have waited for these releases before starting with Drupal 6. However, keep in mind that including in core will not mean that you can use Drupal 7 earlier, it would mean that you have to wait longer for Drupal 7.

BTW I've read that Drupal 7 will include basic views functionality.

mo6’s picture

Actually it doesn't matter (for "serious" development) if Drupal 7 bundles Views en CCK in core. The net wait is the same. However, it would underline the importance of these modules for the Drupal project. In comparison to other open source CMSs the CCK and Views functionality (are one of many elements that) makes Drupal stand apart and excel.

NikLP’s picture

I would actually prefer if more emphasis was placed on getting core AND essential contribs ready before releasing core on its own. There seems little point to me in D6.x sitting there stagnating without the contribs when more time could be allotted to improving it. I don't want to start the obvious flame war so I'll shut up now :)

webchick’s picture

shiva7663’s picture

A corollary to that question would be "Why wasn't Version Q of Drupal delayed until critical modules R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z were ready for it?" heh.

webchick’s picture

I made an attempt of writing this up at When does a new version of Drupal get released?

The pain with Drupal 6 has less to do with the core release cycles, however, and a lot more to do with the fact that A LOT of the "critical" contributed modules underwent almost ground-up rewrites during the porting phase, all at once. Had *only* Views or only CCK or only Project or only Organic Groups done this, we'd be in a totally different place. However, they all chose this release cycle to do major refactoring, which has slowed down progress.

The good news though, is that because of these ground-up rewrites, we'll be able to build far more complex and flexible sites in Drupal 6. :) The other good news is that it's a lot easier than you think to port modules with the awesome Coder module. :)

marcvangend’s picture

I'm thrilled about all those great new features! This will not only make developing and theming easier, but I will also need less modules, less php logic in my contemplates... Good work people.

My only question: If I start building a test site with Drupal 6.x-dev and these release candidates, can I easily upgrade to a site with Drupal 6.3 and final releases of Views2 and CCK2? I know the usual upgrade method, but does it also apply to dev versions and RC's?

robertDouglass’s picture

But you are correct that an upgrade will be needed, so don't forget to read release notes and run update.php!

- Robert Douglass

-----
my Drupal book

cheboks’s picture

Very good news. Now, i make my new site on drupal 6. Thanks!

Cheboksary

palo’s picture

How good are these developers - three significant modules nearing production release.

I'm confident that the release of these modules will increase the uptake of Drupal 6.

Thanks also for the write up on each module. Great reading!

Allan McDonald
Legless Lizard Media Pty Limited

Xpress Vote

Kevin P Davison’s picture

I nearly had to backup to v.5, and this is a welcome event. I may be able to continue with v.6 now, and offer what my clients need.

@Quevin — Sr. Technical PM

Kevin P Davison’s picture

Seems like the file is corrupt...

@Quevin — Sr. Technical PM

merlinofchaos’s picture

Lots of others aren't having troubles, so I'd re-download it.

-- Merlin

[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

-- Merlin

[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

Kevin P Davison’s picture

Not sure why it was being corrupted during my download, as I tried multiple times on a few different systems. Works now!

@Quevin — Sr. Technical PM

kulvik’s picture

Yes!

Best regards,
Thomas Kulvik

Ny Media AS
www.nymedia.no
+47 4000 7955

DamienMcKenna’s picture

A huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this, this will be a huge boost to Drupal 6's uptake and acceptance in the world.

--
Damien McKenna | Mediacurrent

Abilnet’s picture

Congrats and thanks for your hard work!

webthingee’s picture

Thank You All!

winston’s picture

Unbelievably good news.

ergophobe’s picture

My heartfelt thanks! This is fantastic.

jwxie518’s picture

dude
i had been waiting for a longgggg time

Boletus’s picture

*Sobs with joy!*
8-)

I will definitely help to test these critical and much longed-for modules.

A big hug and twenty crates of beer to you!
Cheers.

rkdeveloper’s picture

i started working on views with cck.....

jacobson’s picture

The announcement in this post is great news. The post includes this sentence:

Until then, you must use http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/cck-6.x-2.0-rc2.tar.gz, the latest development release of core.

The link points to CCK but the post calls the link the latest development release of core. Is the link correct? Or, is the reference to the latest release of core incorrect? Or, is the latest release of core included in the cck release?

Thanks.

HAJ

NikLP’s picture

As far as I can tell, MOC is referring to the core of CCK, not drupal core..

merlinofchaos’s picture

Odd; it points to a Drupal dev download, not CCK, and I don't see any evidence that he post has been edited. I'm not sure how you're seeing it as a link to CCK.

-- Merlin

[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

-- Merlin

[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

Pasqualle’s picture

alex_b’s picture

Congratulations and a big thank you to everybody involved.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/lx_barth

spjsche’s picture

Thanks.

amandawolfe’s picture

So has anyone actually made the leap of faith and snagged the dev version of core to start playing with these (exciting!) new releases? I have a test site I've been slowly but surely developing over the past few months and I've mostly been waiting for these modules to go live with my site. I'm expecting slow traffic at first, so I'd be comfortable flipping the switch with release candidates, but I don't think I'd be comfortable going live with a dev version of drupal core.

Anyone pondering the same issues? I think the answer is that I have to just wait for an official 6.3 release, but who knows when that might be... sigh.

(PS: tried a test version of my site with the dev version of core--not good. TONS of "Undefined" errors. Yikes.)

eaton’s picture

(PS: tried a test version of my site with the dev version of core--not good. TONS of "Undefined" errors. Yikes.)

You're seeing those notices because only the dev versions of Drupal are set to show them. Drupal Core itself is E_ALL notice-free, but a number of contrib modules aren't. While it's certainly a best practice to develop in E_ALL mode to prevent possible problems down the line, seeing those notices isn't inherently evidence of any bug or issue. :)

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

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram

amandawolfe’s picture

Thanks Eaton! I did some googling and thought that might be the case, but it's great to have it confirmed. Any ideas how to make them go away? Did some more searching and didn't find anything that really helped.

(This is probably why folks like me who are more graphic design-oriented and only partially code-literate shouldn't mess with dev versions of core.. :))

amandawolfe’s picture

figured it out. only took me 2+ hours of Googling. ;) how on earth did i ever do work without Google? Thanks again though, knowing what term to search for (E_ALL) was Crucial!

drupalnesia’s picture

There are a couple of bugs in Drupal 6.2 that are fixed in Drupal 6.x-dev that make it very important that Drupal 6.x-dev is used (or, when it comes out, Drupal 6.3)

We all know that hard to upgrade to Drupal 6.x without CCK and Views. Now, the waiting time was over but we still need D 6.3 ASAP, otherwise the upgrade path will not smooth. Hope the core-team releases D 6.3 soon.
Thanks for spending time to continue maintenance CCK and Views module!

andrus_k’s picture

That's awesome news about CCK, Views, and OG! Congrats to Merlin and everyone involved!

I think the live news sites like mine are still waiting for stable releases of few other key modules before we can consider upgrading. One of such modules is Panels. Again it is maintained by our guru, merlinofchaos. I think we, the active users of Drupal, need to step up and more actively test the new releases and contribute to porting other key modules we need to D6. Thus we can quicken the time we can safely upgrade our sites. I guess I said nothing new, but, well, I needed to speak it out. Just waiting is not good enough.

http://www.westki.info

Wolfflow’s picture

That's why I love you so Folk. Thank to all.
Cheers

Share your experience with the Open Source Community
it's not only a choice but a Life Philosophy !!!

Contact me for drupal projects in English, German, Italian, Drupal Hosting Support.

paldev’s picture

Thia CCK module gives me a Fatal Error and crash my site
Thank you

notarealperson’s picture

Make sure to report that in the issue que - this isn't the place.

Thanks to everyone who worked to get these upgraded and out the door!

Delta Bridges’s picture

Many many thanks for the hard work... we do appreciate it :)
Expat9

fago’s picture

Congratulations and a big "Thank You" for the great modules!

WorldFallz’s picture

Wow-- this represents an unbelievable amount of intensive high quality work. Yet more evidence of the fact that Drupal has no equal in the world of open source cms's.

Kudos to all the developers involved!

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
-- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

joep.hendrix’s picture

Thank you guys for adding so much additonal functionality into these must have modules.

-----------------------------------------
Joep
CompuBase, Drupal websites and design

-----------------------------------------
Joep
CompuBase, Dutch Drupal full service agency

vkr11’s picture

This is great. I am going to give it a spin.

-Victor
http://drupalsearch.org
Discussion on Drupal Search - http://drupal.org/node/272208

joealli’s picture

the new features are great.thank

mErilainen’s picture

Nice work, I have been waiting these for a month or so. And now Drupal 6.3 is out!

I haven't tried these yet, but has there been any advancement to create pages for groups? At the moment I'm using Panels to achieve this and it is not working really well. Panels is a great tool for admin to create the site itself, but group admins don't know all the tricks and probably don't want to spend time studying them to create some static pages for groups. Some kind of mechanism should be available to automatically show the content of the group in a menu or similar. I guess OG Blueprints provides this functionality, but is not updated to version 6 at the moment.

futurist’s picture

Great news, thanks very much! Now we just need the CCK ImageField module as well - please. (How is everybody doing D6 sites without that...?)

RKC’s picture

Yes, I am wondering the same. I too wanted to start building a fresh site by initially starting with basic pages and then bells and whistles but can't do even basic page without ImageField. I too am wondering how are others doing without it.

mortenson’s picture

MANY THANKS FOR ALL WORK!

: )

scottrigby’s picture

SpriteGF’s picture

I'm wondering, is there a reason why og_notifications will be used instead of subscriptions_og (which seems further in development, includes support for time, etc.)?

ludo1960’s picture

Hello merlinofchaos,

You said "and is full of JavaScripty goodness" that is poetry!

You are wasted as a programmer!

Great work though!

Many Thanks!

mainebob’s picture

On this very page we have the text link:

Download Organic Groups 6.x-2.0-rc1

Yet it links to: 6.x-1.0-rc1

Is this just a typo 2.0 vs 1.0 or is there a new
version of Organic Groups that works with CCK2 ?

AND THANKS!

GoofyX’s picture

It's just a typo. If you visit the project's homepage, you'll see it's 6.x-1.0-rc2 (now).
--
... 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

Thanks, fixed.

avangelist’s picture

Superb, now all I need is for somebody to pick up the slack on the i18n module to iron out the bugs in that and I will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Web Developer
Music Photographer

sixty4rpm’s picture

Hmmmm... the links do not seem to work. When I click on ">>" (the link looks like: /node/16285?page=3&view_name=og_files&view_display_id=block_1&view_args=19295&view_path=node/16285), nothing happens, except that the page number advances, for example "4 of 45" -> "5 of 45"

After much googling, it would seem that I'm the only one having this problem, and it's driving my slightly nuts.

Any ideas?

~Cheers

smeerpaal’s picture

inadvertently

GoofyX’s picture

Currently, CCK is on 2.0-rc6, where Views is on 2.0-rc1. Is rc1 the last version for Views before final? Am I safe to use 2.x-dev?
--
... 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...

marcvangend’s picture

I think you'd better ask this question as a support request in the issue tracker. In general:
- it's never final until it's final
- rc's and dev's are never 100% safe (theoretically, even finals aren't)
- dev's can be beter or worse than the most recent rc

ergophobe’s picture

That said, it's working fine for me offline (some other things to hammer out before making my test site live).

I've done quite a bit with it, though, and so far so good.

Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)