A security problem in the version of Drupal I was running finally prompted me to spend the day upgrading the system to the new 4.6 series. The good things: the new trackback anti-spam system is working very well, so trackbacks have been re-enabled. The new image system is much less buggy than it used to be, and in particular, resizing properly happens only in one direction now. Access permissions specific to taxonomy terms are actually working now, so works of fiction are now only accessible to users who are logged in (at Lynne's long request). There's now a type of node for storing recipes, should that become of interest. Nodes can now accept arbitrary files as attachments. The image filter actually works now, making it easier to publish linked thumbnails.
The bad things: it took me the entire day, and was a horrendously painful procedure. With the exception of one trackback that was nothing more than a link to myself as I was working out how trackbacks worked some months ago, all of the previous trackbacks have been lost. Image uploading is much more annoying now, allowing only one upload at a time, rather than doing it in a batch...
... and every single image has to have its resized versions regenerated. This means that accessing the image galleries is going to horrendously slow, and may repeatedly time out, until the images have been accessed enough for all of the resized versions to have been stored to disk. The ability to see EXIF data from inside of Drupal has also been lost, though at least the EXIF information isn't stripped from the original size image, and the ImageAssist system is so badly broken that I'll probably remove it shortly — it was never very useful anyway. I'll be going through the image galleries, trying to force them to display and thus regenerate all the needed images, but until that process completes, expect that galleries to be unreliable at best.
Please send feedback if you run into anything else that isn't working the way it should be. In particular, there are probably a number of entries with embedded images hardwired to the old locations, and not using the new image filter. If you see one, please leave a comment.
