Important

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.

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.

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.

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.

This site has just had its first upgrade in over three months. The site is now running Drupal 4.7 RC3 (i.e. the newest version of Drupal on the planet), as well as the latest CVS version of categoryi. This upgrade also brings the functionality of the activeselect module to the site for the first time.

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.

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 second tutorial to be written for the categoryi module teaches you how to import taxonomy and book data using category_legacy. This tutorial is a must-read for anyone who's switching from taxonomy and book to the category module, and who has a sizeable amount of old data that needs to be converted.

The categoryi module now supports activeselect-powered AJAX for category selection forms! This is extremely cool - definitely one of the coolest user interface enhancements that Drupal has ever had. The way it works is as follows: if you have two containeris on (for example) your site's 'add story' form, and the categories in one container (e.g. 'cities') have categories in another container (e.g. 'countries') as their distant parentiis, then the two select boxes will be linked by AJAX! Select a different country, and the list of cities will change on-the-fly.

What's even more cool is that this linking can work recursively. So you can have as many levels of distant parents as you want - for example, you can have 'countries', 'cities', 'suburbs', and 'streets' - and when you change the selected country, all three other select boxes will suddenly change!