Drupal 6.17: The Drupal Super Fixer-Upper
As much as I talk about Drupal here at CMS Report, I often don't talk about Drupal point releases that provide solely security and bug fixes and no new features. Every once in awhile though there is a new version of Drupal 6 that has been especially polished by Drupal's developers. Drupal 6.17 is one of those releases which contain significant changes I think are worthy a mention.
I'm probably most excited about the improvements made in Drupal 6 for better PHP 5.3 compatibility. A couple weeks ago I tried upgrading my server to PHP 5.3 and there were just too many annoying errors showing up in the Drupal 6 system logs. I'm hoping with Drupal 6.17, I have better luck this time around (currently running this Drupal 6 sites with PHP 5.3).
With over 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6, the following are the highlights of changes included in Drupal 6.17:
- Improvements of session cookie handling
- Better processing of big XML-RPC payload
- Improved PostgreSQL compatibility
- Better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility (my fingers are crossed)
- Improved Japanese support in search module
- Better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation
- Improved logging for login failures
- An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16's new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved
The latest version of Drupal may be downloaded from the project page at Drupal.org. Whether you're new to Drupal or currently maintaining a Drupal site, this latest release of Drupal is a clear indication that there is plenty of life and plenty of development taking place with the Drupal 6 release. Now what other Drupal 6 sites do I have that still need this upgrade to Drupal 6.17.
About this CMS Enthusiast
Bryan Ruby is the owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch. Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government.
Comments
#1 HTML Filter - No More Comments displaying as text!
One of the biggest gripes I had with Drupal up to 6.17 is that a patch was required to properly filter out HTML comments inside of nodes, comments etc. if they input format they were using had the htmlcorrector filter turned on.
Comments would be escaped and converted into visible text, meaning you'd see in some random places, and other HTML comments as well—especially the nefarious Microsoft Word-pasted comments!
http://drupal.org/node/222926
I think this is reason enough to upgrade immediately! Much nicer now that I don't have any core patches to maintain on any of my sites :)
#2 The fixed HTML filter
is my personal favorite too! Jeff stole my thunder but he wrote it up more nicely than i would have. Hooray for that patch, and for this entire rare non-security point release!