An important attribute of the Drupal development process is the concept that changes need not be backwards compatible with previous major versions. This allows Drupal developers to make changes to the underlying structure of the code making it more robust, easier to maintain, easier to extend, and faster. Sometimes these changes are transparent to site administrators, developers, and themers. In other cases, you may need to make changes to your site, module, or themes to take advantage of this new functionality or make it compatible with the changes.
We will explore these changes in detail in future chapters, but here are some of the major changes that may affect your sites, modules, and themes:
- The footer message and mission statements have been removed and replaced with a simple custom block. Old sites will be upgraded during the installation process if they used the footer message or mission statement.
- A new default region called help has been added in addition to the default regions: header, left, right, content, and footer.
- The content region is now required and the main text of a page is rendered as a block to allow other blocks to appear before it in the content region.
- JavaScript and CSS files for a theme are no longer detected automatically and must be added to your theme's
.infofile. Similarly, all code files must be identified in a module's.infofile. This will help to improve overall performance since Drupal will not need to constantly scan for which files to include. - The search box no longer needs to be rendered by the theme. It is now part of the block system and can be rendered in any location using standard block functionality.
- The Taxonomy API has been reworked to make it easier to use and to make it more consistent with other APIs. We will cover this in more detail during Chapter 2.
- Several APIs have had parameters added, deleted, or renamed. Some functions have been renamed or removed entirely. We will cover these in detail during Chapter 7.
In addition to these changes, several other modifications have been made to Drupal's core functionality, which we will explore throughout the remainder of this book.