News

Hello! Bdragon here.

As I'm sure everyone who's tried to use some of the more advanced features of Category with Category_menu knows, Category_menu needs some serious love.

I have opened a task here to discuss the future of Category_menu.

Please drop by and post your ideas, suggestions, rants, or experiences!

The categoryi module now has a new owner and chief maintainer: bdragon (a.k.a. Brandon Bergren)! Bdragon has made himself recognised as a valuable member of the Drupal developer community, and over the past several months he has helped out significantly in bug fixing and issue queue cleaning for the category module. Please join me in welcoming Bdragon to his new role.

I am pleased to announce that version 1.1 of the categoryi module is now available. This is a maintenance release that fixes a number of non-critical bugs in the category and related modules. There is no new functionality in this release. The release is available both for Drupal 5 and for Drupal 4.7.

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.

As you can see from reading the announcement on GreenAsh, this site has just finished undergoing a much-needed upgrade. The codebase has been upgraded to the latest stable version of Drupal 4.7. What's more, this site is now sharing its codebase with that of GreenAsh.

Over the past three months or so, the development of the categoryi module has basically ground to a halt. This happened because I have been very busy working on another of my Drupal projects, the Import / Export API module, as part of the 2006 Google Summer of Code. Unfortunately, I am still the only real maintainer of the module, and so when I'm not around, not very much happens.

During my "absence", the bug queue for the category module grew tremendously, into the monster that it currently is. This bugginess, combined with the recent lack of developer activity, has made people worried about whether the category module will continue to be maintained for the future, and about whether the many bugs that are currently in the module will be fixed. I am pleased to say that the answer is yes: the category module will continue to not only be maintained, but also improved and developed further, for at least the next version of Drupal; and the bugs that are currently plaguing the module will be fixed.

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.

A recent set of statistics posted in a Drupal mailing list thread confirms that, of the drupal.org projects that have a 4.7 branch, the categoryi module is the 12^th most downloaded project! This places category in the same league as such long-standing Drupal favourites as the image module and the event module, and even places it ahead of the amazing up-and-coming CCK module. This is really quite stupendous, considering that the category module has been around for less than 6 months, and has managed to achieve such growth.

This site now has a new tutorial, to help you in using CCK nodes to build a category hierarchy. This is something that is only possible with the recent development of allowing other node types to be categories / containers. Also, this tutorial was published almost a week ago, but this announcement was delayed until now because a core Drupal bug prevented it from actually being carried out. That bug has now been fixed in both the HEAD and the 4.7 branches of Drupal.