Sorry to weigh in here, but I wanted to give a non-coders point of view...<br><br>One of the biggest challenges I personally face when upgrading my sites is the daunting task of trying to sort through, <span style="font-style: italic;">
"ok... I delete all of the "core drupal files" and then untar the old ones, and then run the upgrade... wait, what are the core files again?"</span><br><br>It might not seem like a hard process for people that does this all the time, but for someone like me, it is a lot of work to do a drupal upgrade.
<br><br>What I think would make Drupal THE killer CMS app is quite simply if we were to have a button somewhere in the admin section(Prompts the user only every 24hrs), displayed prominently that says:<br><br>[ 3 new updates - Upgrade your Drupal! ]
<br><br>let me digress for a second... <br><br>I use Ubuntu Linux. I use it because it's super duper easy. It's easier than Windows and OS X IMHO. I've used Linux for 10 years now. I can't code. Anyway, I use Ubuntu because of it being easy.
<br><br>Mostly each morning I'll see a button on my Gnome panel that let's me know some action is needed in order to make sure my system is up-to-date. I click it, it does it's magic, and poof, my system is happy. I don't have to touch config files, and am not even prompted to interact with the process.
<br><br>I don't see why we can have the same sort of system with Drupal. <br><br>When I clicked on the "Upgraded your Drupal!" button, or link, it would go through and say: Please enter your UID1 username and password. [provided said user was in right role for upgrade notification]
<br><br>Performing upgrades... (grabs and does stuff in the background: makes a diff of files or whatever to use as a restore method if something goes wrong, backups db etc..)<br><br>Presents the user with:<br>Upgrade complete!
<br><br><br>Something that's super simple, easy and "Trae Proof"[tm] :)<br><br>That is what we need.<br><br>Sure, if you want to be uber-chx-geeky and hack everything with a hexedit tool or whatever, go for it! *grin* But for those of use who are end-users who just want to manage content and only fight with the editorial process, we need simple.
<br><br>Thanks, sorry for the long email.<br>Trae<br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 5/16/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Dries Buytaert</b> <<a href="mailto:dries.buytaert@gmail.com">dries.buytaert@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Richard,<br><br>On 15 May 2006, at 22:57, Richard Archer wrote:<br>> Recent discussions on the Consultants list has raised the issue of
<br>> the cost of doing business using Drupal, notably the high cost of<br>> upgrading existing installations due to the ever-changing nature<br>> of Drupal's API.<br>><br>> I wonder if there would be any interest in forming a group to
<br>> tackle this by identifying where the current API has potential<br>> for improvement and perhaps even writing some code!<br><br>re-thinking some of Drupal's APIs is a good thing. If that makes<br>them more consistent, and less likely to change in future, that is
<br>great.<br>I happily accept patches that clean up the APIs. However, I can't<br>promise that they won't change because we won't officially freeze<br>them. In practice, however, APIs might end up being frozen because<br>
there is no longer a need to change them. APIs evolve and mature<br>too. The pager API, to name just one example, hasn't changed in 1-2<br>years.<br><br>If you think you can help them mature in a clean and consistent<br>
manner, that is great. But, the focus should be to clean up APIs,<br>not to freeze them. In pratice, a good API might eventually freeze<br>itself.<br><br>--<br>Dries Buytaert :: <a href="http://www.buytaert.net/">http://www.buytaert.net/
</a><br><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br> Trae McCombs || <a href="http://occy.net/">http://occy.net/</a><br> Founder - <a href="http://Themes.org">Themes.org</a> // <a href="http://Linux.com">Linux.com
</a><br> CivicSpaceLabs - <a href="http://civicspacelabs.com/">http://civicspacelabs.com/</a>