Drupal Upgrades and Community

Wow, so much is happening in the Drupal community that I am having a hard time keeping up. Isn't that great news!

I finally got around to upgrading one of my Drupal 4.7 sites to Drupal 5 RC 1. As expected, I didn't have too many problems upgrading. However, those using previous versions of Drupal might be initially thrown off to where contributed (non-core) themes and modules should be placed on their server.

In the past you usually placed these third-party contributions into either your ../themes or ../modules directory. With Drupal 5 you're now encouraged to place these themes and modules in the ../sites/all directory. The idea is to help you better identify which themes/modules are part of the core (baseline) and which are contributed (third-party).

Making the directory changes isn't difficult, but the documentation included in D5 RC1 may have been a little vague for some. Luckily, someone already spotted the need to clarify and improve a future release the Readme file. The Readme.txt found in the ../sites/all directory on Drupal's development code repository currently reads:

This directory should be used to place downloaded and custom modules
and themes which are common to all sites. This will allow you to
more easily update Drupal core files. These modules and themes should
be placed in subdirectories called modules and themes as follows:

sites/all/modules
sites/all/themes

My original gotcha was that I was placing the modules and themes in the sites/all directory without the respective subdirectories. Now don't call me slow...you know you almost made the same mistake too!

In other Drupal news, maintenance releases were made available last week for the stable versions of Drupal. Drupal 4.7.5 and 4.6.11 were released to fix some bugs as well as two security exploits.

Over the weekend, Dries announced that Drupal.org has migrated from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5 RC. Dries also mentioned that "Drupal.org served more than 9 million pages last month (36 million hits) so this upgrade should give Drupal 5 a good last workout and allows us to evaluate the readiness, snappiness, sweetness and overall happiness of the final Drupal 5 release." I can already smell the final release of Drupal 5...it's coming very soon.

Finally, Bert Boerland in a post on a well-written predictions for Drupal in 2007 discussed a "drupalcodersexchange.com site where demand and supply of Drupal knowledge will be traded". I like the idea, but was concerned about the mention of domain names that may or may not be used for the project being announced online. I've been burned in the past where I've mentioned potential domain names online to only have domain squatters snatch them away from me.

I went ahead and registered the potential domains just in case the Drupal community does have a need for them. The domain names of course are not intended to be used by me and if needed will be transferred to the Drupal community. I just didn't want someone with ill intentions to take them and use them against the community.

• drupalcodersexchange.com
• drupalcoderexchange.com
• drupalexchange.com
  

I've been around enough to know there are plenty of skeptics in the Drupal community to question my motives. Believe me, I don't want to profit in any monetary sense of the way. The fact is that I've already received more knowledge from the Drupal community than I've given back. In other words, I've already been paid in full.