Aranfoolcaytar

Drupal 6.x is looming. A few months ago, I wouldn't have chosen that particular word, but as it's getting closer and closer, I see past the smoothness and shiny new features and remember what a major Drupal version upgrade actually means for me as a site developer: Endless hours of coding to get my modules compatible with the new API.

DHTML menu, now, was easy. I pretty much spent half a day on getting it to work in D6 - after being stumped for several days regarding the new menu system, of course.

XBBCode, on the other hand, I set off to the side. This is not because its structure has to undergo some major refactoring - in fact the filter API hasn't changed at all (or at least not in a way that broke my module). Rather, it uses a few high-level menu items and configuration forms - and as always, the new Drupal version completely revamped the menu system and Form API. Forgive me for waxing cynical for a bit. Form API is a thing of beauty once you understand it - and hopefully that will be the case before it is rewritten again and gets even more beautiful.

Still, after some reading and bothering the other developers on IRC, I finally pushed XBBCode into a shape where it works in Drupal 6. The engine with all its settings forms and custom tags is functional - though not E_NOTICE-free, because of a strange behavior of the new menu system that I still have to figure out. The basic tags package required practically no updating.

I am expecting more trouble with the other sub-modules that implement their own settings forms, but none of them are as bad as the engine itself.

The new version of XBBCode 6.x-dev is not yet on SVN. I still have to split off the DRUPAL-5 branch before I commit the 6.x version into the repository. So this is little more than a hype topic. I expect to have the version done in another week, however.