At long last Drupal 6 has been released in a final version.

After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers

[From Drupal 6.0 released | drupal.org]

Congratulations to the development team!

I am currently testing Drupal 6 - but as I use a large number of modules on the main site I will wait for a while until I upgrade the main site.

I'm sorry - the site (or at least the sites running in Drupal have been down for most of the day as I have experimented with

1. A update of PHP to 5.2.4

and

2. Install of memcached on a separate server to see if I could speed up the Drupal sites.

The first part had severe problems due to a couple of extremely memory hungry Drupal modules taking far more RAM than expected. This should now be sorted.

The second part is now working, but not giving much of a speed boost so far.

There may be a few side-effects of the PHP upgrade for some of the sites, as I have not managed to check everything yet.

But I do know that my xmlrpc.php module for b2evolution has some problems - I'll be back as soon as I have investigated this.

The first step in getting Drupal 6 ready by the developers have been done - they have now gone into code freeze:

Code freeze in preparation of Drupal 6.0:

Thanks to all the hard work we've done in the past months, the next version of Drupal will have a lot of great improvements!

improved logging functionality

support for reverse proxies

many language system improvements (support for right to left languages, advanced language detection, support for translating posts to different languages, etc)

improved handling of teasers

drastic theme system improvements

an improved installer

support for OpenID

and much more

There are also a ton of API improvements that should lead to more and better contributed modules. For a complete overview of the most notable improvements, take a look at the CHANGELOG.txt.

I discovered today that Technorati refused to pull up any news from this blog for the last few weeks, and tried to find out why....

To cut a long story short I used the URI http://www.gisvold.co.uk/~gisvold/drupal when I registered the site with Technorati, and it has somehow stopped working.

So I did a /usr/bin/curl --silent --compressed http://www.gisvold.co.uk/~gisvold/drupal from the terminal window, and got a "301 redirect" message back. So I now know that Technorati no longer will follow 301 redirects (for a number of very good reasons I should add). So I had to make sure that Apache rewrites

http://www.gisvold.co.uk/~gisvold/drupal to http://www.gisvold.co.uk/~gisvold/drupal/

(Notice the trailing slash /) - as this should work.

This sentence in .htaccess did the trick :

I have been trying to get memcached to work with Drupal 5.2 for a couple of hours today, and after getting past the original problems in installing memcached and the PECL memcache PHP modules (and upgrading to PHP 5.2.4 in the process), but still no joy.

Everything seems to work - and I can communicate with memcached (running on a separate computer), but after running the patches for the Drupal 5.2 include/ files I only get blank pages.

Running php from the commandline gives me the following errors :