All node revisions were stored in a serialized field in the node table and retrieved for _each_ page view although they are rarely needed. We created a separate revisions table which would be in principle identical to the node table, only that it could have several old copies of the same node. This also allows us to revision-related information, and to provide log entries to non-book pages when a new revision is being created.
TODO:
1. Provide upgrade instructions for node module maintainers!
2. Upgrade modules that implement node types.
3. Provide an upgarde path for revisions. Dependency on the upgrade system.
keep track of the user's last access. In turn, this allowed me to:
1. Optimize the "Who's online" block. On drupal.org, the "Who's online"
block requires 32 SQL queries. With this patch, only 2 queries are
left (eliminated 30 SQL queries), and one of the two remaining queries
became appr. 20 times faster.
2. Correct the "Last access" column in the user administration overview
table. The presented data was not accurate, which led to the column
being removed. You can now sort users by 'last access'.
Drupal's existing caching mechanism doesn't perform well on highly dynamic websites in which the cache is flushed frequently. One example is a site that is under attack by a spambot that is posting spam comments every few seconds, causing all cached pages to be flushed every few seconds. Loose caching immediately flushes the cache only for specific users who have modified cached data (whether or not they are logged in), delaying the flushing of data for other users by several minutes.
(I rewrote the help text a bit and made minor changes to the code comments.)
This patch adds folksonomy support to Drupal (named internally as "Free tagging"). In a nutshell, the core difference is the input method: unlike normal taxonomies which are administratively controlled, a "free tagging" vocabulary allows tag creation when the node is submitted. It does this through an text input box, as opposed to a dropdown or selectbox. This patch:
* Removes the useless "Preview form" of a vocabulary.
* Alters the vocabulary table to include a new "tags" column.
* Adds a new "Free tagging" preference on vocabulary creation/editing.
* Modifies the vocabulary overview to support pagers for free tagging vocabs.
The new code integrates tightly with the existing taxonomy code. The only additional processing occurs on node save and edit, where we parse through the tags associated with a node. All other display (and thus, code) remains the same.
1. Removed a duplicate line from the changes to update.inc.
2. Excluded the session.inc changes: they did not make sense to me.
3. Excluded the search related changes in the node and search module. According to Steven these are not correct.
We added a 'severity' column to watchdog():
watchdog($type, $message, $link) --> watchdog($type, $message, $severity, $link);
* Specify a severity in case you are reporting a warning or error.
* The $link-parameter is now the fourth parameter instead of the third.
TODO: document this in the upgrade guide.
- Slight addition to INSTALL.txt with regard to PHP versions.
- Updated/reworded some node type descriptions as per Boris' suggestions.
- Adding missing {} around a table name in update.php.
changes are:
1. Simplified the statistics pages: there are less pages and on the
remaining pages there is a lot less visual clutter (less columns and
better presentation).
2. Reorganized the 'administer - logs' menu: flattened the menu structure
and removed a number of links.
3. Improved performance. Most statistics pages used about 160 slow SQL
queries which made the statistics pages fairly unusable on my system.
The new pages use at least 10 times less SQL queries and render much
faster. They are actually usable.
4. There is now a 'track'-tab on node pages, and a second subtrab on the
user accounts 'track'-tab for people with the 'access statistics'
permission. They can be used to resp. track the node and the user.
This makes the statistics more accessible.
5. Changed the way watchdog messages are filtered. This makes it easier
to introduce new watchdog types.
6. Reworked the statistics module's permissions.
7. Less code: 223 insertions(+), 343 deletions(-).
8. Fixed several glitches: for example, the statistics pages sorted the
'Name' column by user ID instead of by name. Unfortunately, it is
too difficult to backport these to DRUPAL-4-5.
TODO:
1. Review the statistics modules help pages.
2. Help fine-tune the interfaces/views.
NOTES:
1. You'll want to run update.php.
+ Drupal 4.4 stored profile data in the serialized user->data column. Drupal 4.5 stores profile data in tables (but user->data is still available and used for other stuff, like locale or themes). The update from 4.4 to 4.5 didn't remove the old data from the user->data column properly, because there is no mechanism in user_save to do so (it did try to unset the fields, but this has no effect).
+ On registration, hook_user('insert') is invoked after saving the data column. This means that any module-specific data is put into the data field. We cannot move hook_user('insert') higher up, because before that point, we do not have a complete $user object yet.
Steven Wittens
Dries Buytaert