The WGBH.org Development Blog

One of the great things about open source software is, obviously, that there are all of these great people out there writing code and making it available to everyone. In the world of Drupal this means that there are tons of great contributed modules that are pretty much invaluable to a site like WGBH.org, like Views and CCK.

It also means that those of us who have to maintain a Drupal site need to keep up with the improvements and changes to all of this code by periodically upgrading the code bade. Often times this usually just means grabbing the updated code and running the upgrade script. Things usually go pretty smoothly.

Except when they don’t.

Take, for example, the other day when I saw (thanks to the CVS Deploy module) that there was a new release candidate version of CCK (from 6.x-2.0-rc6 to 6.x-2.0-rc7). I went ahead and grabbed the new code and ran the upgrade script against my development installation (don’t want to do this on the live system!). Then I checked out our TV schedules grid and it looked like so:

Using my years of web development experience and my highly developed technical acumen I quickly deduced that something was wrong! The quesiton was, what?

So I went to the issue queue for CCK and found that, indeed, the latest RC version of CCK required the latest development version of Views.

OK, since I’m reluctant to use development snapshots of modules, I figured that there would probably be a new RC version of Views coming out soon with the required fixes to allow CCK and Views to once again play nice together. Sure enough, in another day or two there was a new version of Views (6.x-2.0-rc1 to 6.x-2.0-rc2). I then upgraded Views (again, on the development suite) and got this:

Hmmm. Better, but still not quite right. Basically, there seemed to be a problem with passing in date arguments to the view used to generate the schedule grid; there was a similar problem with the full day schedules.

Soooo, I then went to the Views issue queue and, sure enough, found out there was a problem with the new RC release of Views and it’s interaction with the Date module. Namely, that the date filters normally available to Views were now missing, which is what I saw.

Once again I figured that, rather than go to the development version of Date, I’d just hang tight and see if a new RC of Date was released soon. Bing, bang, boom - the next day it was! After then upgrading Date from 6.x-2.0-rc2 to 6.x-2.0-rc3 (and also upgrading Views again, as a new RC was released in the meantime, to 6.x-2.0-rc3) and checking the site I saw…. this!

Whew! Everything was back to normal.

The lesson here? Some might look at this and say, boy, what a pain in the rear this open source stuff is! But not me. On the contrary, I think it demonstrates the greatness of open source and the community of people out there responding to problems, fixing bugs and generally making my life much easier. Sure, patience is sometimes required, but that’s a very small price to pay, in my opinion.

So, a big thanks to all the folks who build Drupal and Views and CCK and Date and all of those other modules! Well done, folks.