New features

After several weeks spent working on a patch, the categoryi module has now been upgraded to Drupal 5! Using drupal.org's new release system, a stable version 1.0 of the module has been released in the Drupal 5 branch. The Drupal 5 upgrade of the category module is a maintenance release only: no new features have been added to the module recently.

The newest addition to the categoryi package is the category_pathauto module. Native category module support in pathauto has long been a sorely-missed feature, and has really been the last missing piece of the puzzle, in terms of a category-module-powered site where all of the navigational elements perfectly and identically reflect a flexible hierarchyi. I have already written some instructions on using category with pathauto, which explain how to use some of the new pathauto pattern placeholders that category_pathauto makes available. Many thanks to drupal.org user Ramdak for generously sponsoring this crucial development task.

The categoryi package has a new addition: the category_bulkedit module. This module has been under development in the HEAD branch for the past week or so, and is now stable and relatively bug-free, and is available in the 4.7 branch. Category_bulkedit allows you to edit multiple categories or containeris at once: you first select the nodes that you wish to edit; then you select the fields to edit; then you enter your new values; and then the values get saved in bulk, for potentially hundreds of nodes! The development of this module was jointly sponsored by drupal.org users Kiteatlas and Ramdak.

The categoryi module now supports the ability to allow nodes of any type to be categories or containers. This is a major new feature, and one that many users have been waiting for. One user in particular - who goes by the name of kiteatlas on drupal.org - wanted this feature so badly that he paid me to speed up its development. That's right: this is the category module's first sponsored enhancement!

The taxonomy and book wrapperis can now be installed automatically, using the new wrapper installation script! This script eliminates the need to go through the tedious (and somewhat confusing) process of copying and renaming the wrapper files manually. The installation instructions included with the module, and the online copy of the install instructions, have been updated to explain how to use the new script.

Category_display now has a new option, called show assigned nodei count in TOC. When enabled, table of contents for categories and containeris will show the number of nodes assigned to each categoryi that's listed. A database upgrade has been provided for category_display, and the creating a basic hybrid structure tutorial has been updated to include instructions for using this new option.

In the latest version of categoryi, containeris now have a new field called 'admin title'. This field can be used to differentiate between containers that have the same title. In administrative interfaces, the admin title is shown instead of the actual title, if it is defined. The creating a basic hybrid structure tutorial has been updated to include instructions for using this new field.

Since I'd seen that some people were unsure whether Organic Groups and Category are compatible, I thought you'd all be pleased to know that I'm testing them together, and so far they're playing quite nicely together.

The categoryi module got some long-overdue cleaning up today. The outline view in the administrative interface (along with the orphans view) has been moved out of the core category module, and into a new module called category_outliner, which can be found in the contrib/ directory. The transform feature, which allows nodes of other types to be transformed into categories and containeris, has also been moved into its own module in contrib, called category_transform.

The categoryi_legacy module now supports exporting your categories and containeris to the taxonomy and book modules. This is a feature that's been sitting in the queue for a while, but it's now complete. You probably won't need to use this feature, as the taxonomy and book wrapperis are able to maintain all your category data in the taxonomy and book systems as well. But in case you need to do an export back to these modules, now you can.