Drupal 4.5.0 installed

The updated to Drupal 4.5.0 was almost uneventful; there are a few things that caught me offguard (even though Mitch Frazier warned me of one of them).

First was the database update stuff, since I was upgrading from 4.4.2. Mitch had told me about this, since we're planning to update Linux Gazette to 4.5.0. That and a few other things lead to my experimenting on my site before pissing off the Linux Gazette community with weird happenings. Now there are a few things that could be done with the installation notes in Drupal. When one looks at install.txt, you're told to run 'upgrade.php' and that then tells you to add some tables. Fair enough, but wouldn't it be better to have that available in the install.txt? I think so. I ran the upgrade script off of the link in the upgrade.php file, and there were some failures (because I hadn't added the tables they said to).

Umm. Couldn't we have the tables updated in upgrade.php? Well, it would be involved since there are different updates needed for different versions. Fair enough. I added the right tables, verified that the tables were as they were supposed to be in MySQL, and happily plodded my way through until the thing I thought would be easy.

Since my host (Pixelstation.net) uses the '/admin' URL for a web console, I remembered that I had to hack the .htaccess file and the includes/common.inc file. This I did, and woe was me. Well, it wasn't that bad. But the links *still* didn't work right for the drupal administration interface, so I had to manually expand 'admin' to 'administration' to fiddle with things. And it still didn't work. There were some temporary hang-ups as well because of trailing spaces somewhere in the PHP additions I did (why don't the PHP folks fix that!?), but I hunted down these typos and fixed them.

And the thing STILL didn't work.

So I read up on Changing "user" and "admin" URLs (host automatically redirects) and found, lower in the thread, about the new global URL aliasing. That sounds really impressive, but to get there one has to have the ability to get to the administration pages in the first place.

No worries. I did it. So now the site is functional, now I have to explore the functionality and dink with the themes.

You know, I like this sort of stuff... but I sincerely doubt many other people do. I haven't come to a conclusion on how exactly to make it better, but I'm thinking making the 'admin' urls for drupal the 'drupaladmin' directories makes some sort of sense. It gets past all this gobblygook that will scare the heebie jeebies out of less technically interested users. But then, people like me need to get paid, right? Yeah, but not for solving the same problems over and over. That's boring.

If you see weird things happening on the site, I'm breaking stuff in the background again.