New features in Drupal 6 (updated)
By greggles - February 11th, 2008
Tagged:
This screencast provides a 29 minute overview of the new features that Drupal 6 offers. Covered features include the new installer, the new core modules, the various usability improvements, performance improvements and the other major improvements, which are hard to show in this short video.
Learn how to avoid the 5 biggest SEO mistakes on your Drupal site!
Just fill in your name and email address and we will start sending you emails to access our 1 hour long Drupal SEO video tutorial!
Drupal in Action
Drupal in Action is the only book to go from complete beginner to a full-scale Drupal site. Written by Greg Knaddison and Ezra Barnett Gildesgame, the book is available in a pre-release e-book form.
Use coupon code ug367 and get 37% off the book.
Use coupon code ug367 and get 37% off the book.
Comments
Nice post !! I really liked it .. Don't forget to update it regularly...
I still haven't made the switch over from Wordpress. I just haven't seen enough convincing evidence that Drupal is a better platform.
Thanks very much for this, Greg. I was handed a Drupal 6 site to administer with almost no instructions. So as a non-techie newbie, I've been stressed the past 2 weeks, searching online for relevant info that I can understand and wondering if I should give up on Drupal and have the content transferred to a different CMS
Your 'new features' screencast isn't the complete starter training i need but it was clear, easy to follow and it made me more enthusiastic about using Drupal.
So this was a breakthrough, giving me hope i will in time figure Drupal out and get my site working. I'm sorry that the more user-friendly version of Drupal 7 will come too late for my learning curve, but your screencast was encouraging and I will look at your other content to see what else I can learn.
After a year this realise is still a big news. Wow, drupal must be very popular. Does some of you uses also Joomla or you've decided for drupal only?
I have never tried Drupal before. I have heard most of the advantages that come with using it. I think it's time I try it out.
You should try it - this gives a great overview.
What advantages of Drupal more than other CMS or other open source blog source ?
Coolness , thanks , this overview will be infinitely useful for my Drupal research ,
-Dino Delellis
You know, I hear about drupal more and more each day. I keep thinking that it is probably time for me to take a serious look at if this platform will be right for me. Thanks- Lynd.
Just came across this while searching on google about drupal and great overview so thank you.
Now I've got a question - I need to install Drupal in Russian, it's more understandable for me. Where did you get that file with the Hungarian language? Where shouls I download the Russian language?
Great overview, this is the perfect way to get an overview. There are definitely some great new features. One thing that disappoints me though is that when someone writes a comment who has not logged in it still says (not verified) beside their name. It looks really bad for visitors who have no idea that this is just a problem with the CMS. Is that going to be fixed in future releases?
Another question would be when a WYSIWYG editor will come as standard on Drupal releases? If we want users to generate their own content we are restricting 90% of the population to just writing plain text as they wil either not know how to or not want to spend the time uploading pictures on to a different server and then importing the html for it to show up on the Drupal site.
I use Drupal 5.1 on my current site http://www.buyingcheap.co.uk and would love to be able to upgrade to a Drupal release which gets rid of the (not verified) problem and offers a stable WYSIWYG editor as standard. I keep having to turn fckeditor off as it seems to be full of bugs. If both of those problems were fixed there would be no competition between WordPress and Drupal because at the moment that's the only 2 areas that WordPress is better on.
I really like the way the screencast shows up with a pop out feature. How do you do that?
The video is very good with side bar navigations.
I've heard that drupal is a resource hog. Does it take up that much more bandwidth than with something like WP?
Thank you for the screencast. I'm new to Drupal.
It was very useful info for me.
Dupral is like Joomla to me. It has some of the greatest features in social site building for those who don't know how to hard code, but "for me", it's limited. It has to be tweeked a lot after building. However, for those who need to have a site built quickly, I would have to say, Dupral does a fantastic job for anyone who does not mind learning a piece of software that will do it all for you.
I've downloaded your screencast. Thank you. Actually i've just learing Drupal...becaus after WP it seemed to be more difficult.
Really nice intruduction to new Drupal 6 features.
I already know most of them, but when I sow your overview I realized that this is big improvement for most of users.
I have been contemplating switching to Drupal for my real estate blog but I just cant seem to pull the trigger. Wordpress is a very strong platform and allows for tons of plugins, not to mention all the cool themes. Maybe one day....
Thanks for the Video! I just installed Version six and it has a lot of potential.
Everyone says that setting up and installing Drupal is the hard part. I’ve found that to not be the truth. Installing Drupal was not any harder than installing any CMS package. You have to know what you are doing, or it will break. Modules are easy to install and manage.
The big problem with Drupal is the Voodoo. Things randomly seem to start and stop working. Permissions issues crop up, and are gone a few minutes later, only to rear up with a death toll finality. Solutions on the community range from effective and logical to total utter flailing around. If you use Drupal be prepared to randomly go into your DB tables and hack things.
I can honestly say that I will never use Drupal again. Unexplained phenomenon are par for the course. Everything is total utter Voodoo, from the way Drupal builds it’s markup and div structure, to theming, to fundamentals like permission controls.
If you are at the start of your project and using Drupal, get out now while you still can before you get dragged into the ninth ring of Drupal hell like me :(. Just my personal advice though
You and your developers have put in a lot of effort with Drupal 6 and the updates that are available to clients. Well done! Videos sure are a good way to get your message across in an interesting and engaging way. I look forward to seeing more great things form Drupal in the future.
Greggles, is Drupal better than WP? I'm just wondering because I see a lot of problems with WP. I would appreciate your feedback, thank you.
Great presentation for someone (me) debating whether to look at other CMS apart from wordpress to power some of my sites.
Thanks
Very nicely done, thanks heaps. Can't wait to implement Drupal 6
Drupal still has a mysterious feel about it. Got to admit that version 6 looks awfully cool!
I've been using Wordpress for a long, long time so I'm not so sure about switching over to Drupal. I looked into it some time ago when I was trying to use Drupal as a portal for my vbulletin forum. In your opinion, how would you rate the ease at which someone can switch over from WP to drupal? I'm not liking certain upgrades made to WP and it's getting away from the simplicity that attracted me to it...
I'll be honest that's the first time I hear about Drupal. Sounds interesting.
Drupal is gaining popularity and becoming a viable solution.
Richard, get used to hearing about Drupal. From a CMS point of view, Drupal is quickly becoming the dominant solution.
Drupal will never be as popular as wordpress until it is as easy as wordpress. But, if you dumb drupal down enough to be as easy as wordpress, it loses it's power and usefulness in my opinion. So, i'm not worried about it's popularity, I just want to see to it's features and usefulness continue to increase.
Drupal 6 - many new possibilities. But many the necessary modules are not adapted yet for Drurpal 6. I prefer version 5.9
I've been using WordPress for the majority of my work; but the features of Drupal that you present make it look like a very attractive platform.
Drupal is great if you are talking about a major portal site, but ModX is way slick if you haven't tried it. Community support rocks, but plug-ins aren't as diverse, but not that I needed them. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. I also prefer to use WP for small sites, which is the majority of what I encounter.
Thanks for the screencast it really helped me see the changes from Version 5. Although because I rely on several modules that are not available in 6 yet, I am stuck with 5 for now, but look forward to upgrading when Views / CCK is out of beta.
Cheers,
Gavin.
Drupal - the best CMS from all which I used. There is an internet-shop on it. Much plaginov, expansions. In general the best control system by a site.
It looks really good, the screen cast has been put together well. I think I may give it a go, I have been looking for a new solution.
Thanks for the info.
For anyone that's interested, I've been using Wordpress as a CMS for some time now. I looked at moving to Joomla but there didn't seem to be a clear migration path. However, Drupal has wp2drupal which allows an almost error free transition (tip make sure you're using PHP5). This currently only works for Drupal 4.7 but I managed to upgrade to version 6 with only a couple of minor issues. I've recently moved one of my test bed blogs and now I'm getting ready to move one of my live blogs (gulp!). If you dig around the search engines you'll also find some nice info on how to transition your theme to Drupal.
Hope this helps anyone thinking of moving from Wordpress to Drupal.
P.S Back everything up first in case you decide you don't want Drupal!
Thanks for the screencast! I am new to Drupal and it was very interesting. Was watching it with my brother and we are going to build a test site, to get used to it. Maybe we will convert from wordpress to drupal!
Thanks
Ive been using wp for so long, but have been becoming more and more convinced that drupal is better. Thanks for the screencasts man.
or is it better than that? I'm getting confused by all these online diary mediums. Does it make any difference if I were to use this Drupal instead? I'm getting quite a headache trying to find out more about all these technicalities.
Wow! There are a lot of great features -- very nice.
I made the jump to Drupal and have not looked back. Anybody seeing this cast I highly recommend you make the jump you will not regret it.
John
I've been a huge fan of WP as a CMS, but I'm really like some of these features Drupal has. I've considered giving it a try for a while, but just haven't made the leep. I'll prob give it a shot after I finish up a few projects. Thanks for the video.
Drupal has come a long way in the past few years. It has become more user friendly as well. What really helps is that there is more and more people offer helpful resources and direction as to how to use Drupal and to get the most out of it. Thanks for the screencast!
Thanks so much for this screencast. It really helped me to learn more about drupal. And I really love it that it is a video and not just text which is a pain to read and less informative.
Keep up the good work!
Very timely - just installed ver 6 and wondered what the differences were ;-)
Thanks
I am so behind on the times. Maybe it is finally time for me to get myself in gear and wove to Drupal.
I had been considering to jump to Drupal for quite some time and this great screencast has convinced me to do the switch.
Again Thanks
Vic
excellent video!
Thanks for video
Very useful
Thanks for producing this summary, some great new features and looks like things will be easier overall now,
Your video is very informative and clear, Thank you!
Thx for the Video, I used the 5th Version for a long time for a lot of my projects and your video gives me a good impression of the new features.
Do you have a budgie? It sounds like you got one ^^
Thanks for the drupal seo screencast.
Hello again. Greg, I am new to drupal and am building a largish website with many requirements and as the list of modules and users grow I am finding it hard to manage the admin of it. I have to go with Drupal 5 for now and then upgrade later, so I miss out on heaps of things that Drupal 6 has to offer. The only place I can find (currently) that shows the thingo that moves the top bar header for the Role types along with you is in your video!
Somewhere in there - you show enthusiastically this feature that is designed so you don't get lost when assigning access permissions to users...
I just cannot find it after a long time of searching.. Could you please point me to a module that I can use with Drupal 5 that would give this functionality please?
I believe it's called tableheader.js or something like that.
Nobody has backported it to 5.x as far as I know (not sure how feasible that is) so you'll just have to wait (or buy a taller monitor!).
--
My Drupal articles
Great summary and vid
cheers
There's dozens of new features in Drupal 6. I chose to concentrate on the one that is most directly applicable to my day job. That doesn't mean security isn't a concern.
Well it certainly made clear what real value there was to using drupal 6 vs 5, i.e. really none.
Hm, maybe you have to pay closer attention to the video :)
nice intruduction to new Drupal 6 features.
Thanks for sharing
Your video is a great help
Great site. I like your style. I will be checking back very often. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for a great info!
Your video is a great help and confidence builder. I had tried an install a year ago and gave up. I was ready to "wing" another attempt, and came across your video presentation...thank You!.
I used drupal for my site http://thestasis.com and another one within my organisation-intranet. Later as I learnt and realised the scaling potential and usability, I felt Drupal was better for an enterprise and may be wordpress for personal blogs. I see competition for Drupal from SharePoint. Don't know much about SharePoint but enterprises tend to stick more to vendor provided solutions than Open Source.
Having said that, I upgraded my company intranet site to Drupal 6, and my personal site to wordpress. One big reason was the Wordpress2.5 dashboard that allows me to see at a glance what all's been happening. Drupal badly needs that one.
While I have more suggestions (read stinkers) for WP, I personally find Drupal to be more suited for enterprise level scalability and customisation. Something that works right out of the box is WP2.5
Hi Greg
Thanks for a great and informative screencast!
Peter
Further proof that Drupal is the wave of the future.
That's a very informative screencast, I have been looking for more information about Drupal 6 to compare it to Joomla and this helped me out a great deal. Thanks!
am wondering, if there is somewhere detailed overview of new + improved features in drupal 6 release...? Also some preliminary code?
very interesting
Thanks for the video, great job
Very interesting post. I just started by blog using WordPress, even though I heard so many great things about Drupal.
Is there any conversion to go from Joomla to Drupal? Would one have to start from scratch and import SQL and content one at a time? I like the drupal backend and would like to try it.
Great site and very helpful info.
Thanks.
Thank you for interesting information.
great blog, very interesting information.
Thanks for sharing new features of Drupal!
It was a great jump start on the new features of Drupal. Thank you greggles.
Thank you, It might be useful for future screencast's to include agendas? This blog is about New features in Drupal 6.
This is stable version of Drupal 6?
Great job - thanks for the videocast!
thanks alot for the post and the video, very helpful!!!
Thanks for posting the screencast. It's always nice to see things first hand....
Very interesting post, but I feel like I am too late. I just started by blog using WordPress, even though I heard so many great things about Drupal..
Great tutorial, thanks for sharing!
i have started working on with drupal 6
and i must say that it has really been improved and all the new features are so handy
much better than the older version
I decided to move my blog to Drupal 6 right now, since it amazing...and I am eager to the SEO Screencast!
hey thanks, i am thinking about upgrading our site swingwind.com to drupal 6 and this screen cast as helped me a lot
when i watch drupal screencasts my head just blows away of the features and possibilities. Suddenly you feel like "oh here is the universal product that will make my life, your life, everyones life better" and just dont know what to build first :D
thanks for the video :)
hey thanks for sharing good job keep it up
that was really helpful. looks like you took some time on it. thank you for sharing this walk-through!
Good work. Continue write.
I like to learn by having someone explain something to me, then reading about it and when I apply it kinetically, I got it. This is a great start for me as it takes care of the first step and part of the second. All this needs is a transcript and some exercises to drive home the message for me. I just found out about Drupal today as it was mentioned on joomla.org
I'm somewhat of an intermediate website developer, at least enough to remember what it was like to be novice, and as I surf around everything Drupal I can't wait to dive in and try this. Thx for putting up the screencast;; it seemed just like having someone next to me to show me something new. I hope to get into a position (financially and intellectually) to give back to the community soon.
Hmmm... well that test showed ALL the other comments in bold as well... so now I will turn off strong and the next ones should be normal...
Thanks Greg! Excellent job. Love your enthusiasm.
Checking the example for unclosed tag...
LOL, we don't run Drupal 6 yet, so you cannot test this feature here.
And in 3 months you were the first who didn't close his HTML tag, so it is easier to close this by hand than installing a module for this :)
P.S closed your
strongtag :DThank you very nice cast.
I'm a new ro drupal and have a little wonder about primary links and secondary links.
I have installed drupal 6 and it's works fine.
but when i created new page "About US" primary link and i added 3 sub page into it. But nothing was appears below the About us. I have tried different themes. In the menus, Below the "About Us" i can see the subpages. I totally confused with this and don't know what i going to do...
Anyone have suggestions? or how do i solve this just like old ones.
http://amarjargal.org/mn
Thank you guys.
After try out, i have decided to use navigation menus. But i have re-scratch sitemaps. Gotto learn a lot.
Primary and secondary links behavior is slightly changed compared to Drupal 5.
Primary and secondary links are now independent menus and more meant to be one level deep. It is certainly possible to have deeper primary links, but this does not make much sense any more. Use navigation menu instead.
So, Drupal themes that do not show sub menus in primary links are not too wrong.
Some themes support all Drupal functions, others not. :o(
The quickest way to solve your problem is what you did: choose an other theme.
You can find other solutions and can get more answers at drupal.org. (I think that is the right place for questions like this...)
Hi,
I really appreciate this content and effort if I could only watch it that is.
I am running PCBSD and cannot view Flash 9 content because there is no native support for that quite yet (soon). Seeing as we all strive to live in a open-source compatible world, perhaps you could see fit to offer these videos in a standard format as well, or just back up to Flash 7 for the BSDers out there.
Tnx, Jeff
Hi Jeff - sadly this format has a lot of benefits like having chapters that can be selected to better navigate the movies.
I'll see about getting another format online but the rendering and uploading process is quite time consuming.
Thanks for the feedback.
Greg
My Drupal articles
Many thanks for the screencast!
It is said creating themes became really easy in Drupal 6. Could you create a video about it next time? Thanks!
Yes, that is next on the list along with some other more in depth tutorials!
--
My Drupal articles
cool!
thanks for sharing it :)
Great work here !!
I am interested in enabling screencast for my site also. Can you point me to what tools you are using for your screencast?
Thanks,
Linda
Hi Linda. I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Here is an article which describes three options I've used: http://growingventuresolutions.com/blog/howto-create-screencasts
--
My Drupal articles
Thanks for the screencast! I was really looking forward to the new Drupal 6.
However, having watched your screencast about the internationalization features, my enthusiasm has decreased :( The problem with the navigation menu per language made me stop developing my site in Drupal 5, but it looks as if it's not better with 6. This would be a real drawback.
Birgit
Hi Birgit - I'm glad you like them.
I believe that the contributed i18n module has some solutions for that. http://drupal.org/project/i18n You may also want to discuss it with the experts in the i18n group http://groups.drupal.org/i18n because I was just discussing Drupal core but much more is possible with contributed modules.
--
My Drupal articles
I appreciated learning about all of the usability improvements.
This should be in the drupal handbook.
Hi Makea - that was the plan all along and (especially now that I re-organized some of that section) it is easy to find them.
All the Drupal6.x videos: http://drupal.org/node/128752
This "what's new" video: http://drupal.org/videocasts/whats-new-in-6
--
My Drupal articles
Greg,
Nicely put up for those seeking quick into on D6. D6 rocks!
Roshan
Nice presentation.
Some of these new features are really nice. I hope they keep up the good work.
Really nice intruduction to new Drupal 6 features.
I already know most of them, but when I sow your overview I realized that this is big improvement for most of users.
Thanks for the screencast. It might be useful for future screencast's to include agendas? e.g.:
minutes 0 - 10: installing
minutes 10 - 20: usability improvements
minutes 20 - 30: caching
great job
Thank you.
Nice summary and nicely put together screencast.
Great screencast! One question on the performance page. How can page compression be enabled if caching is disabled?
I believe that was added in Cache with zlib results in double compression.
I think you are right that if you do not have caching enabled then the compression toggle has no impact on the site. Perhaps the widget should be disabled in that case.
How can I use your affiliate sollution in Hungary?
We don't have affiliate solution -- what solution do you asking about?
Nice overview! Thanks!
Post new comment