Drupal 6 comes with a refined interface in many regards, and some of the things I love about this upcoming release are the more subtle changes. Here is a list of some changes in Drupal 6 which I think will be important but might need some time for previous users to accomodate to:
- Access control becomes permissions. Logs becomes reports, Categories renamed back to Taxonomy (and, by the way, comes with a simplified vocabulary setup form).
- Permission names are better and their coverage is more complete. Drupal 6 even includes a forum maintenance permission so finally you are able to have forum moderators (oh, well, we admittedly play catch-up with dedicated forum software here). Delete permissions are separate from edit. All-covering edit permissios are named edit any $type content, where $type is the type name to make this extremely clear.
- We got rid of most technical lingo like Requires cron. as present in previous versions. Now there are better explanations and links to relevant status checks and more information.
- No more Submit titled buttons. Most buttons are simply titled with Save, Delete and so on as appropriate. This is not 100% consistent in Drupal 6 yet, but we have gone a long way forward.
These are just some of the polish memories from the top of my head, which really show the detail in how we think about the usability of Drupal 6. There will be future releases, and more such improvements will be made, but I think we have done a lot of good things to Drupal in this release.
Yes on taxonomy
I'm also glad that Categories has also been switched back to Taxonomy. While I'm not sure everyone fully understands taxonomy (after two years I still feel like a newbie), I always thought Categories oversimplified this classification feature. Taxonomy says to me..."look at me" and "dig deeper so you know the true me".
Another subtle change you forgot to mention was the change for how you "break" the teaser (now called a summery) and content. Very nice...toggle switch that let's you rejoin the summary and content back into the post.
I'm also glad it got renamed
I'm also glad it got renamed back to taxonomy because that's consistent with most of the documentation, however, I think consistency within the subsequent versions of the software is even more important. It's bad practice to be changing the terms we all got used too.
All but taxonomy
I like all these, since they make Drupal more human, except for the taxonomy part. Categories is better in this case.