Well just as I finally upgrade to Drupal 4.73 Dries goes and does a Code Freeze for Drupal 5.0. There quite a few major changes going into the next release of Drupal, hence the new major version number. So I am going to briefly go over some of the things I think are really cool, and how they improve the system.

When browsing over the change log a few changes jumped out at me immediately. Admin page retool, web installer, JQuery, block system, PHP Template, and removal of Drupal.css all are significant changes.

Admin Page Retool

The main change here is the ability to theme /admin pages. A long time ago the admin section of Drupal was themed completely separately than the rest of Drupal, in fact it may not have been posible to change its theme at all. Then just as I started developing for Drupal there was a new "feature" that made the admin section use the site theme. I was against this from the start.

Developing a good theme is not an easy task, it's important to have control over all the html that is going to be output to the browser so you can apply styles accordingly. The admin section has a lot of tables, lists, and forms. It has a lot more stuff in there that not many sites have in their basic layout. So whenever you develop a theme you have to keep in mind how the admin section will be affected. It is just another thing a style designer does not want to have to worry about when developing a site.

Also, it makes Drupal tutorials, and instructions much harder to make. When there is no common admin interface for everyone there is no common ground for us to build upon. For example. Lullabot has been making some useful Screen Casts for Drupal where they show you how to do cool things in Drupal. They mostly use the default Drupal theme to keep the interface consistent, but if anyone has themed their site at all their admin section could look completely different. It just makes it harder to communicate.

By default I would like to see the admin interface keep the standard theme, and give the developers the option to theme the admin interface if they want to customize it. This will mean a lot less work for theme developers at the start, and a more consistent experience for Drupal administrators.

Web Installer

This is a big feature that has been in the works for a long time. All the ease of installation features are nice, but Install Profiles are the biggest part of the Web Installer. Profiles allow you to create specialized Drupal installs that meet a specific need. For example, you can now make a Drupal blog profile, which will install just like Drupal, but at the end you will have a full featured community blog that is pre-configured with all the needed modules and settings.

I think that this is how Drupal should be used. Drupal is more of a development framework than anything else. With this new installer you can leverage that framework for a specific task and make it easy to install and use for people not looking do develop a site from the ground up.

Drupal is powerful enough to implement nearly any of the popular web applications out there right now, like Word Press, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. With this new installer maybe we will start to see better cohesion of similar modules and resulting systems that rival other very focused web applications that are already out there.

PHP Template

The biggest change here is the ability to apply Block templates based upon the region, module, and delta value. This is another step in moving away from the standard column layout of Drupal. Now you can place blocks in any region of the html file, and theme them differently based on where they are. So you no longer need to just have columns with blocks in, you can put blocks anywhere.

I was planning on doing this already with my site and 4.7.3 by adding a recent nodes block under my main node listing on the front page. Maybe adding a book review block, and other fun stuff like that there too. But this new feature will make it much easier to implement that.

Final Thoughts

I listed more features than I discussed here, but I think the benefits they bring to Drupal and the users are pretty obvious.

Overall these changes are great, I am really looking forward seeing what Drupal 5.0 can do. When I get my home development network setup I am planning on playing with the cvs version and see what it can already do. Seeing as the there is a freeze in place already I am thinking that it is going to be pretty stable already.