Drupal 6 is out!

Submitted February 23rd, 2008. Last changed February 24th, 2008

I thought I would try installing Drupal 6.0 on a subdomain just for fun, and document how it went, but it went so fast it didn't leave me much to say. What I did:

  • Get the tarball into the subdomain directory and unpack it. In my case that was a wget -c http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-6.0.tar.gz over ssh to my webroot directory.
  • Then create a database. In my case that was through the Dreamhost Web Panel.
  • Point the url to the drupal directory (DH Web Panel).
  • Go there in web browser.
  • Choose installation language.
  • Choose database -- I went to advanced settings here and told it the database hostname too.
  • Next, create a user. Drupal 6 has a checker that told me my first password choice was only "medium"-strength and suggested I make it more complicated, so I did.
  • Drupal checks right away whether your server is set up to handle clean urls. That's pretty cool.
  • There's an option to have Drupal check for updates automatically. This is a welcome addition to the core, although there was a module in Drupal 5 to do this.
  • Click to get past this page: oh, that's it. Done.

With Drupal installed and a user set up, there's just site configuration to do. The administration pages don't appear radically changed.

The book module has been rewritten. I'm not familiar with the 5.x (and previous) book module so I can't compare. I typed some nonsense into a couple of book pages, and uploaded an image. That's about as far as I'm going to get at the moment: some of the modules I normally use aren't ported to Drupal 6 yet, so I can't jump right in and upgrade this site.

The latest Drupal newsletter indicates that Views and CCK are not quite ready for prime time, although some of CCK is apparently now in core. Views and CCK are crucial ones for me, insomuch as anything about my website can really be described as "crucial." One development I'm looking forward to exploring is the CSS-only theming.

The release page also advertises performance improvements, which are always nice. Clicking around in my couple of nodes and the admin pages, I have to say I didn't see any evidence. I guess it's the MySQL queries that make my site so slow.

Drupal 6 certainly seemed simpler to install from scratch than Drupal 4 and 5. How simple it will be to upgrade from 5 to 6 I'll discover in due time. Since upgrading between 5.x versions is reasonably painless if you're systematic (Matt Farina wrote up a nice outline), I dare to hope it won't be too bad.