by I run a few small websites on my home server; one for myself, one for my homeowner association, one for the people who graduated in my MBA class, etc. Someone pointed out to me the other day that the HOA website was no longer working.
I don’t know when it stopped working; the last time someone (me) actually posted to the site was in 2004 (we don’t have a very active HOA). But, apparently, someone finally wanted to access it for some reason and couldn’t. I’ve done a number of upgrades to my server recently (defined as the last six months or so): upgrading from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 5, upgrading Drupal from 4.6.x to 4.7.x (multiple upgrades for security releases), upgrading memory. So, since I don’t look at all my sites regularly (unless I see new content), I have no real idea which broke them. I *think* it was probably the 4.6 to 4.7 upgrade cycle, when they changed some of the theme engine stuff.
Anyway, since it didn’t work, and I figured it would take more effort to figure out what broke and how to fix it than to restart, I decided it was time for an overhaul and upgrade to 5.x anyway. Wow, I’m very glad that I did!
In the few hours I spent last night working on resetting up my sites, I don’t know that I necessarily found a whole bunch of new functionality, or if I stumbled upon things that were there before but that I didn’t notice.
First thing I noticed during installation was that the web-based installer was much better than before. The site status report was really useful to make sure that all major configurations were correct.
The new administration view/dashboard really makes it much easier to figure out where I have to go to change something. Each admin section has a description so you know exactly what is there to change, and the ability to hide the descriptions if you know what you’re doing to save screen space and rendering time.
The ability to control block display by role or page is really useful. On my personal site, I have my resume posted, and it always looked wrong to have my RSS feeds, stock tickers, and navigation pane on the page. Now, I have them all set to not display on that page, and it looks clean and professional. Similarly, for the admin pages, I don’t need to have my RSS feeds and stock ticker, so that the admin panes can be as wide as possible. The one (minor) annoyance there is that you have to list admin and admin/* separately. I think on the current LOPSA site, we have special PHP code to determine whether to show the signup page based on role; with Drupal 5.x, that code could go away.
The ability to put a block anywhere (left menu, right menu, header, content, footer) is an improvement over the old system.
The module administration page, which groups modules logically, is also quite nice. Each module now lists if it has any dependencies or providers and the status (enabled/disabled) of each of those. The “module installer” module looks like it could be interesting and useful as well, especially if you have site administrators who might need to install a module but don’t have logical access to the server. Unfortunately, it keeps returning an error for me, which could be my config, but I haven’t chased that down yet. A similar installer for themes would be really nice if it doesn’t already exist, and I just didn’t find it.
The one major annoyance that they still didn’t fix (and I’m not certain how it could be fixed) is that there’s no way to reference taxonomy (now usually referred to as categories, vocabulary, and terms) by term as opposed to number. So, for example, if you have a recipe site and want to be able to easily find all the chicken recipes, you have to know that chicken is taxonomy/term/124 (and not taxonomy/term/387) instead of taxonomy/term/chicken (or even taxonomy/term/meat/chicken to differentiate from taxonomy/term/tastes/chicken).
I only played around with it for a short time last night to get the major sites mostly back up and running, but I have to say the changes look really positive. I’m going to have to suggest to the LOPSA tech team that they look into a code upgrade when we do the site redesign.