25th May
2007

With the code freeze for Drupal 6 looming, I thought it was about time I grabbed the Drupal 6.x-dev tarball and had a look-see as to what's been happening in Drupal core whilst we've been busy updating our sites to Drupal 5...

First impressions are the most important, some might say, and I was definitely impressed by the reworked installer. Its cleaner, and allows the site admin to set up configuration, the root user (with uid 1) and some other bits and bobs via a nice, multi-step wizard.

The installer also included some localisation options for installing Drupal in a language other than English, but for now I just clicked to continue in English.

The next new thing to catch my eye was that node body fields now have a "Split summary at cursor" function, which does just that. The Body textfield and its content is split into two at the cursor position, providing a very obvious way to define our content's teasers.

Whilst clicking around the user settings, I noticed the new option to disable user signatures on a site-wide level. Great stuff... oh and could it be... holds breath...

Joy of joys! Comment signatures have been brought up to scratch: they're now inserted into comments dynamically, so signatures on old posts will update and there'll be no mess caused by including signatures when quoting previous comments. This also means sigs are now "stylable" via the template engine.

The next thing I'm going to take a look at is the changes in the way Drupal handles its logging. Looking at the modules list, Watchdog is now turned off (but still listed under 'Core - required'...) and a new module under 'Core - optional' is enabled: 'Database logging'. There's also that Syslog module to take a look at.

As always, exciting times. Dries provided an overview of some of the bigger changes in his post earlier this month.