Drupal updates

I’m using Drupal to power this site. It’s not as user-friendly as — let’s just say WordPress — but very powerful and easily extendable through well-designed PHP modules or even rude hacks inside your posts.

One nice feature for site admins is its status report page: At a glance you can check if your Drupal installation is in good shape, when the last cron maintenance tasks was run, and how many form submissions were blocked by CAPTCHAs.

What I like in particular is the list of available updates for modules and themes:

Through the use of eye-catching colors you can easily spot which modules are current (green), which might be updated (yellow, not depicted), and which should be updated (red). If you look closely, you can read out the modules current version number and the version available for installation. Additionally this page also directly links to the appropriate download packages, release notes, and — as in the example above — you can choose to branch over to the release candidate of a module, or to stick with the development releases.

Downsides? Just a small one… I usually forget to update the database tables, but this will also be displayed at the status report page.

Nice Job, Drupal community!

P.S.: … and you can configure the site to send you an email when updates are due.