The long-awaited and much-anticipated version 7 of Drupal ("D7") was formally released this week. This open-source software package is known as a Content Management System ("CMS") and has been used to run this and other websites hosted by Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") for much of the past six years. We have known that this code was under a long development cycle for quite some time and have tested various components along the way. It appears to be quite promising and should enable the TCM team to do even more with this great software.

Hence, late last week we decided to bite the proverbial bullet and start the rather involved upgrade process of bringing "everything" current. As a result, this website, its sibling websites and the supporting servers all currently are under-going a massive maintenance upgrade. This means that the performance and availability of the website will be more spotty has been the case recently. (In particular, the image software is not working as desired.)

This upgrade includes finally switching the Ubuntu flavor of Linux software on the server from what was 8.04 (Hardy) to 10.4 (Lucid Lynx). Ubuntu 10.4 is the most current Long-Term Support (LTS) release and should be stable for the next several years (like Hardy has been). As is the case with practically any server upgrade, there are numerous packages that also either need to be or can be upgraded to work with the more current version of the software. We currently are in the midst of checking, confirming and installing the associated package changes.

One of the biggest packages that changed with the Ubuntu 10.4 was the programming language PHP. It switched from version 5.2 to version 5.3. Normally that would not be very much of a change. However, the Drupal 6 software was written prior to some of the changes that were introduced with 5.3. In particular, PHP 5.3 is much more strict about the issue of how it passes variables and also has some deprecated functions that were used quite a bit in the Drupal 6 core. Drupal 7 supposedly clears up these particular issues, but may well introduce others that need to be tested for before the final switch to Drupal 7 is completed.

Where we are at the moment is running the most current version of Drupal 6 and Ubuntu 10.4. In the log files, there are a number of errors being posted about problems with pass variable by value instead of by reference. These need to be corrected one by one to get Drupal, Ubuntu and our custom software all peacefully co-existing with one another. We are aware that hidden in this mess is the something that is preventing the correct display of images with their associated content. We are not sure where exactly the problem is, but hope to have the issue eradicated shortly this weekend.

Thanks for bearing with us!