Drupal 6.0 Finally Here!
Drupal 6.0 finally arrived today in a flurry of good will and great timing. Right around the corner we have DrupalCon Boston. In a Job's-like statement from Gábor Hojtsy, we now have the easiest version of Drupal ever. But seriously... it is!
Right now my site is running Drupal 6.0 (just upgraded a few minutes ago), and has been since Beta 4...
Installation was a snap with their new installer which takes care of some of the most minute details quite intuitively. No more hunting through menus for options like Clean URLs that should be part of any standard Drupal setup. Their new password checker is awesome and it really makes things feel more secure from the beginning of the install on to everything else.
Aside from the installer, at first you don't notice much different. Delving into various administrative options, though, will make things readily apparent. User interface changes such as dynamic weights that can be dragged-n-dropped within the menu system, taxonomy, and elsewhere. Actions and Triggers (minimal workflow) built right into core are one of my favorite improvements. Workflow is quite powerful and automation is one of those things that you really don't know what you're missing if you haven't used it and once it's there it is ever so helpful and useful and you can't live without! One of my favorite little features is the Update Status module. Every time I visit /admin on my site this little wonder tells me if I'm out of date on any modules.
The biggest thing for me though, is that Theming in Drupal 6 has been made so much less of a process and much more reflexive to the designer. Info files for themes allow a great deal of control and require less work with a template.php file. It's as simple as taking whatever file you want to use as a .tpl.php, building structure accordingly, then adjusting your CSS as you would with any XHTML/CSS only site. Resources like CSS Zen Garden and A List Apart's Design Topics become more useful as the designer is allowed to focus more on what they are good at - design.
We, the Drupal community, have several awesome modules that are coming soon and will bring the full functionality of Drupal 5 to the ease of use and polished release of Drupal 6. I personally can't wait to see what CCK 2, Views 2, and Panels 2 bring to the arena for Drupal 6. DrupalCon Boston certainly will be interesting. While not a complete list of all contributed modules, this discussion on Drupal Groups gives us an idea of what to expect and when. Exciting times ahead for the Drupal community!
Many thanks to all the people who made Drupal 6 a possibility!
Now go download it and get your 6 on!