The new locale module provides every functionality on the web interface, so you don't need to edit the configuration files or add columns, when you add a new language. This module is an integration of the old locale and localegettext modules, plus a bunch of logic to parse Gettext Portable Object files (opposed to Machine Object files, as supported by localegettext).
Note: I made some minor changes to the context-sensitive help texts and to some of the status messages.
Here's an overview of the changes:
1) Multiple Input formats: they are complete filter configurations (what filters to use, in what order and with which settings). Input formats are admin-definable, and usage of them is role-dependant. For example, you can set it up so that regular users can only use limited HTML, while admins can free HTML without any tag limitations.
The input format can be chosen per content item (nodes, comments, blocks, ...) when you add/edit them. If only a single format is available, there is no choice, and nothing changes with before.
The default install (and the upgrade) contains a basic set of formats which should satisfy the average user's needs.
2) Filters have toggles
Because now you might want to enable a filter only on some input formats, an explicit toggle is provided by the filter system. Modules do not need to worry about it and filters that still have their own on/off switch should get rid of it.
3) Multiple filters per module
This was necessary to accomodate the next change, and it's also a logical extension of the filter system.
4) Embedded PHP is now a filter
Thanks to the multiple input formats, I was able to move the 'embedded PHP' feature from block.module, page.module and book.module into a simple filter which executes PHP code. This filter is part of filter.module, and by default there is an input format 'PHP', restricted to the administrator only, which contains this filter.
This change means that block.module now passes custom block contents through the filter system.
As well as from reducing code duplication and avoiding two type selectors for page/book nodes, you can now combine PHP code with other filters.
5) User-supplied PHP code now requires <?php ?> tags.
This is required for teasers to work with PHP code. Because PHP evaluation is now just another step in the filter process, we can't do this. Also, because teasers are generated before filtering, this would result in errors when the teaser generation would cut off a piece of PHP code.
Also, regular PHP syntax explicitly includes the <?php ?> tags for PHP files, so it makes sense to use the same convention for embedded PHP in Drupal.
6) Filter caching was added.
Benchmarking shows that even for a simple setup (basic html filtering + legacy URL rewriting), filtercache can offer speedups. Unlike the old filtercache, this uses the normal cache table.
7) Filtertips were moved from help into a hook_filter_tips(). This was required to accomodate the fact that there are multiple filters per module, and that filter settings are format dependant. Shoehorning filter tips into _help was ugly and silly. The display of the filter tips is done through the input format selector, so filter_tips_short() no longer exists.
8) A more intelligent linebreak convertor was added, which doesn't stop working if you use block-level tags and which adds <p> tags.
- Users who have not edited their account yet would be reset to GMT rather than the sitewide timezone.
- Users who chose GMT (zero timezone) on a site with a non-zero timezone as default would have incorrect timezone.
+ The 'previous topic' / 'next topic' links skipped topic without comments (changed one inner join back to a left join).
+ The default order setting in admin/settings/forum had no effect.
+ The 'first new topic' link jumped to the first unread topic ever instead of the first unread topic since NODE_NEW_LIMIT.
+ This also removes the unused $offset param from theme_forum_display and theme_forum_topic_list, so any themes using these functions should be updated (i checked the core themes but none of them used these functions).
As discussed before, the path "taxonomy/page/or/1,2" becomes "taxonomy/term/1+2" and the path "taxonomy/page/and/1,2" becomes "taxonomy/term/1,2". The most common case of listing nodes attached to a single term becomes simpler, since it doesn't require a meaningless "or" or "and". A depth of "0" is assumed, but a positive integer or "all" can be used. Feeds are available at "taxonomy/term/1+2/all/feed" and the like.
This iteration of the patch also changes the structure of taxonomy_select_nodes(), since it was not following Drupal conventions. A handful of contrib modules call this function, and will need to be updated. Instead of passing in a $taxonomy object containing parameters for the function, the parameters are passed independently. This simplifies the code quite a bit. The queries were changed to only return node IDs for speed; all results from this function are passed through node_load() anyway, so the extra information returned was discarded. The AND query was also changed to avoid the strange trick and remove an extra query, at the expense of a table join per root term in the AND. This cleans up the code substantially while at the same time enabling the use of AND with a depth parameter.
TODO: update contribution modules.