I am becoming more and more of a fan of the content management system Drupal.

The developers and community at Drupal.org have recently released the beta version of the new 5.0 release. This new version of the Drupal CMS received many new features, including improved performance, a new administrative interface, and a new slick default template.

I decided to download the beta and give it a test drive. Here are some of the things I found during installation and setup.

New Web based Install, Makes it Easier for Everyone

After dropping the drupal files into the main directory for my test site, I created the mysql database and then pointed my browser to the new site.

Here is what comes up:

I choose my database type (mysql) from the radio box, entered the name of my Drupal database, along with the username and password to access the database. Then I hit “Save configuration”.

That was it. My new Drupal install was complete. Nice.

Drupal Website Setup

After completing my install in about 90 seconds, I followed the link to visit “your new site”. From my new Drupal home page I was guided by a five step list to start using my new Drupal site.

So I:

Created my first account

including:

1. Choosing my password
2. Setting my user time zone

At this point it would have been good to be taken back to that five point list. However, I had to go back to my home page to seed the five point list again.

Configured my website

In this section I found some nice new surprises. Beyond the nice looking new default theme called “Garland”, the administration section of Drupal has been reorganized to allow an administrator board-like glance which may be viewed by task or by module. Very sweet! I also liked the descriptions for each task. This ought to be a real benefit for new Drupal users.

One nice thing about this new Administer section is that it takes into account the more frequent tasks an administrator would do and puts them at the top under: “Content management” and “Site Building”

One other nice new feature found in the Administer section is a message section at the top of the page which provides status and error reports regarding your Drupal install.

I clicked on the “Check the status report for more information,” and was taken to Drupal’s new Status report page.

It turned out the error message was really just a notice that Cron had not been run yet. Great thing about this is that I was given a link to help pages which told me how to configure cron, and I was given a link to run the cron manually.

As you can see from the screen shot above, the Status report section gives you a nice little summary on the status of your Drupal site. Once I ran the cron job manually, it was a nice feeling to see all the rows in green. This included the check mark that my configuration file is protected. Also, the status report tells me the version of Drupal which I am using.

Now, back to configuring my website.

The configuration steps were pretty easy to take. However, for the novice Drupal administrator, there is no inline guide or wizard to take them through the most common configuration settings. The new administrator will still have to refer to the Drupal Handbook on the Drupal site.

I decided to start under the Site configuration options and work my way down.

Administration Theme

• Lets you choose which theme you want the Administration sections of your site to use.
• The “System default” option basically uses whatever default theme you have for your whole site.
• Choosing another theme, such as “Garland” or “Bluemarine” lets you build new themes for your site, without having to take into account or worrying about how the Administer sections will work in your theme.

This is helpful for those of us who have developed really beautiful themes for our clients’ front-end site, only to find that administration is hard to carry out with the theme because of the big tables Drupal’s admin sections use.

Now, rather than having to write a bit of code or install a module which fixes this issue, Drupal now allows you to easily choose a different admin theme from your overall site theme.

This is also helpful for those of us who build tutorials for our users with pictures. I can now show the admin task, with a screen-shot in the admin theme, and it will look the same for all my users’ sites who use this admin theme even if their site may use a different front-end theme.

Clean URLs – That is user and search engine friendly URLs

• I clicked on run url test to make sure my site could handle clean urls and then clicked enable.
• Done in seconds.

Date and Time

• Again, easy to setup.
• I don’t notice anything new here.

Error reporting

– I usually set later. Nothing noticeably new here.

File system

• Not much new.
• I always set the path to “files/mysitename” because I use the multi-site configuration and I like for each site to have its own files directory.
• I make sure the temp directory is correct for my server. Usually it is auto set by Drupal and I do not need to change it.
• I always set my download method to private incase I ever want to switch to controlled access to downloads. This may be changed at other times but can cause unexpected problems, so I just start off with this setting.

Image toolkit

A new setting, my site gave this message “No image toolkits found. Drupal will use PHP's built-in GD library for image handling.”

Input formats

• I usually leave these alone until I need to adjust one for a module.
• A nice new feature is the URL filter which reads: “URLs longer than this number of characters will be truncated to prevent long strings that break formatting. The link itself will be retained, just the text portion of the link will be truncated.”

I have had the issue of long URLs in Drupal pages breaking my layout. This is a nice added feature. It existed as a module in 4.7 but I could not get it to work correctly all the time.

Page caching

• Apparently Drupal has an aggressive new caching feature.
• There are now three options instead of two, “Disabled”, “Normal”, “Aggressive”
• I noticed in this section, as well as in many of the other admin sections that the help text is truly a lot more helpful. There are plenty of well worded descriptions about what a feature does and even next to the options, there are parenthetical statements which help a more novice user pick what setting is right for their site. THANK you to whoever helped write this material.

Site Information

–now comes the fun!

• I filled in my sites name, mission, slogan, footer, and default front page
• I also change the typical Anonymous user name from “Anonymous” to Guest. “Guest” seems friendlier.
• This took about two minutes, only as long as it took me to type in my info.
• The clean urls option has been moved out of this section. –Less clutter

Site maintenance, I just leave alone.

So, I installed my new Drupal 5 beta site in less than ninety seconds, and configured it in less than five minutes. This was even without using Drupal’s new install profiles which will make site setup, configuration, and module choices even faster and more automatic. One can see why I am starting to really like this Content Management system.

Further Reading

To read postings about the changes in this new Drupal 5 release visit the following links:

Drupal 5 Beta on Drupal.org

and this great post about the Drupal change log