Sorry to weigh in here, but I wanted to give a non-coders point of view...
One of the biggest challenges I personally face when upgrading my sites is the daunting task of trying to sort through,
"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?"
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.
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:
[ 3 new updates - Upgrade your Drupal! ]
let me digress for a second...
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.
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.
I don't see why we can have the same sort of system with Drupal.
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]
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..)
Presents the user with:
Upgrade complete!
Something that's super simple, easy and "Trae Proof"[tm] :)
That is what we need.
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.
Thanks, sorry for the long email.
Trae
On 5/16/06, Dries Buytaert <dries.buytaert@gmail.com> wrote:
Richard,
On 15 May 2006, at 22:57, Richard Archer wrote:
> Recent discussions on the Consultants list has raised the issue of
> the cost of doing business using Drupal, notably the high cost of
> upgrading existing installations due to the ever-changing nature
> of Drupal's API.
>
> I wonder if there would be any interest in forming a group to
> tackle this by identifying where the current API has potential
> for improvement and perhaps even writing some code!
re-thinking some of Drupal's APIs is a good thing. If that makes
them more consistent, and less likely to change in future, that is
great.
I happily accept patches that clean up the APIs. However, I can't
promise that they won't change because we won't officially freeze
them. In practice, however, APIs might end up being frozen because
there is no longer a need to change them. APIs evolve and mature
too. The pager API, to name just one example, hasn't changed in 1-2
years.
If you think you can help them mature in a clean and consistent
manner, that is great. But, the focus should be to clean up APIs,
not to freeze them. In pratice, a good API might eventually freeze
itself.
--
Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/
--
Trae McCombs || http://occy.net/
Founder - Themes.org // Linux.com
CivicSpaceLabs - http://civicspacelabs.com/