Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Overview of this book

Drupal 7 contains features for which site administrators have been clamoring for years, including support for fields, an improved administration interface, better database support, improved theming, and more. You could of course make a laborious search on sites, blogs, and many online tutorials that would promise to update you about every new feature, but there's an even better way to know all about Drupal 7's new features: Drupal 7 First Look is the first and only book that covers all of the fantastic new features in Drupal 7 in depth and covers the process of upgrading your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7. If you've used Drupal 6 and want to use Drupal 7, you need this book.Drupal 7 First Look takes an in-depth look into all of the major new features in Drupal 7 so you can quickly take full advantage of Drupal 7. It also assists you in upgrading your site to Drupal 7. Some of the new features in Drupal 7 include: Fields API, based on Drupal 6 CCK, which allows you to easily build your own content types Improved user interface for administering your website Built-in support for working with images and files Improved security for the site and users of the site Completely rewritten database layer DBTNG to make working with the database easier and more secure. Improved API for custom module development and user interface theming
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Drupal 7 First Look
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Removed functionality


The developers of Drupal adhere to the principle that simpler is generally better. Therefore some of the functionality that existed in the Drupal 6 core has either been removed entirely, moved into a contributed module, or removed in favor of existing contributed functionality. Here are some of the functionalities that have been removed as well as some suggestions for replacing that functionality if you relied on it in a Drupal 6 site:

  • Blocking of IP addresses using ranges has been removed. You can block single IP addresses within Drupal. However, blocking by range should be done at the operating system or firewall level.

  • Removed Bluemarine, Chameleon, and Pushbutton themes and made them contributed themes. These can be accessed at:

  • Removed per-user themes. Users can no longer select which theme they want to use in the default Drupal installation. There are several contributed themes that contain similar functionality and either allow users to change their entire theme or select between various color variations to customize the site.

  • Removed the mime_extension_mapping variable that allowed files to be remapped to different file types. This can now be done using the hook_file_mimetype_mapping_alter() hook.

  • The footer message and site mission settings have been removed and can be recreated with a custom block.

  • The Blog API module has been removed and replaced with a contributed module. (http://drupal.org/project/blogapi). There are also several other contributed modules that perform similar functionality.

  • Removed the Ping module that broadcasted a message to other sites when your site was updated. There are several other contributed modules that have similar functionality.

  • Removed the Throttle module that disabled site functionality when the site became busy. The Throttle module was removed because it was less effective than other methods (like aggressive caching) at improving performance, and because it was not widely used. Administrators interested in this module should consider using other caching techniques to improve performance.