Posted by Merlin on Fri, 04/08/2011 - 9:44am

So I finally had a reason to upgrade Angry Donuts. Namely that Drupal 5 was holding me back from upgrading my webserver to PHP 5.3. So this is now running Drupal 7. Upgrading the theme was a pain in the buttocks, but everything else went smoothly, since I have almost no custom code here.

While there are a couple of aspects to Drupal 7 that make me unhappy, they're almost entirely low level technical issues. I continue to be concerned about the ultimate performance of Field API, but UX wise, the D7UX team did a stellar job, even though there's a couple of places that drive me crazy there. (If you want to know, #1 iss 'People' which I vehemently disagree with, particularly since we did a TERRIBLE job of it. The page is now completely inconsistent with itself because we changed the name of the page and NOTHING else. Really, go explore. #2 is that the modules and permissions pages are still usability terrors. They both need a lot of love. #3 is that Field API UI needs a makeover similar to what Views got, but that's a big project and I'm just glad we got one in.)

Hopefully nothing's too broken, but notify.module didn't make the update, so currently I have no new content notifications. Will have to figure out a good solution. notifications.module worries me. I hate it a lot in gdo.

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Submitted by Merlin on Fri, 04/08/2011 - 9:56am

This is me testing a comment, just to make sure it works.

Submitted by Jeff Geerling (not verified) on Fri, 04/08/2011 - 11:49am

Instead of Notify, I use Rules, and just set up a rule to send out an email whenever a new comment is left by a non-admin user, or when content is posted to a certain section, etc. Infinitely more customizable/flexible... though not quite as simple as a drop-in solution.

Submitted by Walt Daniels (not verified) on Fri, 04/08/2011 - 12:29pm

What kinds of problems did you have with converting themes?

Submitted by Merlin on Sun, 04/10/2011 - 8:35am

Nearly every aspect of a *.tpl.php file variables changed, so unlike previous upgrades where a theme upgrade would sort of work but be weird, the D7 theme upgrade resulted in unusable output. Had to go in and change almost every variable printed in page.tpl.php and even then it was pretty tough because node.tpl.php and comment.tpl.php both had fatal errors as well.

Plus, the way taxonomy is printed in nodes completely changed, and getting back the old look I had with a simple list of links actually was a lot harder than it seems like it should have been.

Submitted by Mansspams (not verified) on Mon, 04/18/2011 - 10:18am

I would use some nice d7 theme and then uglify it to fit old Angry Donuts theme ;)

Submitted by Justin Ellison (not verified) on Fri, 04/08/2011 - 1:03pm

Regarding the module page, check out module_filter -- it's on every site I manage. I need to get around to creating a module that does for permissions what module_filter does for modules.

Submitted by Corey Aufang (not verified) on Fri, 04/08/2011 - 1:25pm

I also was frustrated with the permissions page, so I created Fast Permissions Administration. It provides filtering on the permissions page for permission and module name.

Submitted by nigel (not verified) on Fri, 04/08/2011 - 3:01pm

this is really something that should be better out of the box. Users shouldn't have to download additional modules to avoid being confused by basic features.

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