I finally decided that what I’ve been developing in the dbscripts module is stable and decent enough to deserve an official 1.0 release. I’ve written up the problem I was trying to solve with these scripts in another blog post.

So what are some improvements I’ve done since I first released it? Besides refactoring and cleaning up the code, I have added:

• A patch to content_copy.module that will transform a content type to the exact settings (database schema wise) of the imported content type. This includes modifying existing fields, adding existing fields and removing missing fields.
• Support for managing SQL files of arbitrary file names
• Support for applying any of the three filtering options (full, minimal and none) when dumping, restoring and erasing
• Descriptive help text when passing a “help” flag

Version 2.0

Now to start looking forward to version 2.0. Porting to Drupal 6 is going to be the primary concern. Now that the contributed modules have caught up to Drupal 6, the only thing holding me back from Drupal 6 is…. myself!* and time and money I’ve grown dependant on dbscripts, so I’ll need to port it before I can do any more development.

Wishlist

• Scaling support for large databases. I have a plan, and it may look a little funky, but it should significantly reduce the time it takes to run the merge script on 100MB+ databases
• Scaling support for large development teams. Currently this works for teams that rarely work concurrently, but will start to become awfully awkward once several people are developing simultaneously.
• Automatic content type updates. Adding a script that will import all the content types all at once through the command line as opposed to the painful process of importing each one individually through the browser