We are excited to announce that three key modules, Views, CCK, and Organic Groups, have published release candidates today, ready for testing. If you are interested in speeding the transition to a full release, install and test the Release Candidates (RC). Many months of work have gone into extensive rewrites of these modules, leading to major improvements that will make Drupal 6 an even more attractive platform for building websites.

As always, you should upgrade these modules on a test site first, and make sure to make a complete backup. You never know how your site's customizations will affect things, or what silly little thing nobody else caught.

IMPORTANT! There are a couple Drupal core bugs that could affect anyone using Views and anyone updating from an earlier version of CCK. They are fixed in the Drupal 6.3 release, please use that.

More details about these pivotal module releases follow...

Views 2

The Views module has undergone extensive development, refactoring, and testing. Views 2 improves the existing functionality of the Views module, and adds new features designed to simplify life for developers, site admins, themers, and end users alike.

Possibly the most important change is that Views can now create lists of anything: nodes, users, taxonomy -- you name it! Another large change you'll notice right off the bat is that the UI for Views has completely changed, and is full of JavaScripty goodness. While it may take some getting used to initially, we're confident that you'll find that the changes ultimately make creating views much easier than before.

A more detailed list of changes is below.

Views links

• Project page
• Views 6.x-2.0-rc1 release notes
• Download Views 6.x-2.0-rc1

New features for end users

• Multiple blocks, pages, and feeds per view.
• Built-in AJAX for pagers, exposed filters, and argument drill-down clicks. Great in blocks!
• RSS feeds for comments.
• Greater control over exposed filters, including being able to reduce a taxonomy list to just terms you select.
• Can have multiple "displays" on a view with the same path, which have different features -- give your administrators and privileged users richer views than others!

New features for themers

• All views output is done through templates, dramatically improving themability; the old views theming wizard is no longer required .
• Additional theming information to customize your views through templates is also provided in the user interface.

New features for site admins

• A completely reworked UI for creating and maintaining views. Features of the UI include:
  • Options are presented contextually; thus, when editing/creating a view, you are presented with only the choices you need.
  • If two people are editing the same View the view will be locked; only one person can edit a view at a time.
  • Live preview! Make a change, scroll down and see what your view looks like.
  • Upon previewing, performance timers show how long your View took to build, query, and render. Great for quick performance tuning.
• Views can pull data from many different core tables. Users, comments, statistics, files, plus other things can be plugged in.
• Can have views within views, known as attachments. These attachments can be used to display multiple, related views within the same space.
• "View type" is now called "style", and has split into Style and Row style to allow far more flexibility in how view results are displayed. We've also added useful styles such as grouping and grid.
• Lots inline help with the Advanced Help module.
• New "Relationships" can let you have all the fields from referenced nodes right in your view.
• New glossary styles make it easy to page items alphabetically.
• Pluggable mechanism to find values for arguments for blocks -- easily create views for the node or user page with no PHP snippets required.
• Views now have optional tags in addition to names; allowing you to sort your list of views and find and edit the ones for which you're looking.
• Export multiple Views at once.
• Tool to analyze your view for common mistakes (that can be expanded through plugins)

New Features for developers

• Reworked, pluggable object-oriented API. Every component of Views is implemented as plugin objects and handlers. Views developers now have a great deal of freedom extending and customizing Views with their own data tables, display types, and view and row style plugins.
• Pluggable argument validation (can embed PHP code) to give you greater control over what kind of arguments your views can use.
• The SQL statements used to generate a view are displayed on preview.

Technical details, and known bugs

1. There are a couple of bugs in Drupal 6.2 that are fixed in Drupal 6.x-dev that make it very important that Drupal 6.x-dev is used (or, when it comes out, Drupal 6.3).
2. If you find yourself having troubles with the JavaScript (there are a few people who report problems that we can't figure out yet) the JavaScript part can be completely turned off and the UI largely works without it, though a couple of places (arguments, in particular) may be a little rough.
3. The upgrade path from 1 to 2 is going to take some manual work to convert your Views to the new format. Views2 contains a Views1 conversion tool, but existing views will likely need some additional work to function in Views2
4. Urgent request! We need some help with the documentation, both editing the existing pages, finishing some of the TODO items, and fleshing it out more so that it is more cohesive!

In using and testing the Release Candidate, if you find what appears to be a bug, browse and/or search the issue queue to see if someone else has reported a similar issue. If you have found something new, please file a new issue.

Content Construction Kit - CCK 2

CCK has been significantly reworked for Drupal 6, both to add new functionality and to integrate into the new Views 2 code.

CCK Links

• Project page
• CCK 6.x-2.0-rc3 release notes
• Download CCK 6.x-2.0-rc3

New Features

• New ajax 'Add more' button that the user can click as many times as they like to add the right number of values for multiple value fields.
• The Manage Fields screen now uses drag 'n drop to make it easy to re-organize fields and fieldgroups.
• The Manage Fields screen now lets you re-arrange non-CCK "fields", like the title and body, as well as CCK fields. A hook is available for modules that want to have their own node form elements benefit from this.
• Numerous usability improvements have been incorporated based on feedback from the usability testing at the University of Minnesota.
• A new API has been added to make it easier to create and populate fields from custom modules and profiles.
• A new Content Permissions module included in the CCK package lets you control access to individual fields.
• CCK now integrates with the Devel Generate module. Core CCK fields and any other CCK fields that implement the content_generate() hook will add random valid field values to the generated nodes.
• New formatters can format either a single field value or all the multiple values of a field. Custom modules could use this to display field values in a map or chart.

CCK / Views 2 Integration

As always, CCK has automatic, built-in Views integration for all CCK fields. Two new features for Views 2 include:

• Add a 'relationship' to a view using a nodereference or userreference field, then add any field, sort, filter, or argument from the referenced node or user to the view (just indicate it is coming from the relationship instead of the original node).
• Views filters now include 'empty/not empty' options.

Known Problems and Bugs
Upgrade from D5

• Many of the older updates have been removed from the code, so you need to get current on the D5 version before upgrading to the D6 version, or you may get messages about missing updates.
• There are still some sporadic upgrade problems.

So *please* be sure to make a backup copy of your database before upgrading to the D6 version.

Organic Groups
Organic Groups links

• Project page
• Organic Groups 6.x-2.0-rc1 release notes
• Download Organic Groups 6.x-1.0-rc1

Compared to Views and CCK, Organic groups received less of an overhaul for Drupal 6. Most of the changes are straightforward improvements which take advantage of new features in core and Views. A few major highlights:

• Member listings powered by Views. Anytime you want to list the members of group(s), you may use standard Views user listings to do so. So you can now list all members who have a given profile field or all members who are group admins and so on. All the power you are used to for making lists of group nodes and group posts now extends to users. For example, the Faces tab in each group is now powered by a View which uses the 'grid' style.
• More Views fields such as the number of members and posts in a given group.
• The current group (if any) is exposed to javascript code. This means you can easily target advertisements or track analytics by organic group.
• Theming groups has become easier as we now ship a template which is for all groups by default. No need to move it to your theme directory unless you want to make further changes.
• Developers who use Devel Generate module along with OG can now generate group nodes and group posts that have proper OG behavior.
• Groups now have an optional 'Group files' block which lists all uploads in the group.

Known issues

• Email notification functionality is broken. I expect to replace it with og_notifications module.
• OG Panels is not available because panels module has not yet ported to Drupal 6.