Bugs & wishlist in Drupal Gardens

Drupal Gardens is still in closed beta, but I was lucky enough to get an account recently. I set up my site and have been tweaking the layout this past week. Setting up the site itself only took about half an hour or so, not including moving over all the content from my old WordPress blog. I tried to put on a newbie hat and imagine I was a non-technical user throughout the process. Overall, Drupal Gardens was very intuitive and it was incredibly easy to build a website. I'm going to talk about my favorite features in a later blog post, but here I'll mention a few bugs I came across as well as some suggested features, all of which I've posted in the Drupal Gardens user forums.

Possible Bugs

1. Drupal Gardens gave me (logged in with administrator and site owner permissions) a message to run update.php, although it will not actually let me complete this operation. At one point, I clicked on "Configuration." I was presented with an error message at the top: 

One or more problems were detected with your Drupal installation. Check the status report for more information.

I clicked this and saw the usual Drupal status report with "Database Updates" in red. I clicked the link to the update.php script and received this error message:

Access denied. You are not authorized to access this page. Log in using either an account with the administer software updates permission or the site maintenance account (the account you created during installation). If you cannot log in, you will have to edit settings.php to bypass this access check. To do this:

1. With a text editor find the settings.php file on your system. From the main Drupal directory that you installed all the files into, go to sites/your_site_name if such directory exists, or else to sites/default which applies otherwise.
2. There is a line inside your settings.php file that says $update_free_access = FALSE;. Change it to $update_free_access = TRUE;.
3. As soon as the update.php script is done, you must change the settings.php file back to its original form with $update_free_access = FALSE;.
4. To avoid having this problem in the future, remember to log in to your website using either an account with the administer software updates permission or the site maintenance account (the account you created during installation) before you backup your database at the beginning of the update process.

It looks like Drupal Gardens doesn't have the "Administer Software Updates" permission available at all. I'm not sure what part of this workflow I was supposed to be able to see in Drupal Gardens, rather than the Drupal 7 powering the site.

2. I added a rotating banner in the Banner region  (see? Isn't it neat?). In the admin interface, the slides can be rearranged from the default order. However, once the page is submitted, the new order doesn't "stick." It switches back to the default.

3. Also on the topic of rotating banners, I chose the button controls which appear as circles at the bottom of the slideshow. it looks fine in Firefox, but I noticed each button has a tiny dot underneath it in Safari and Chrome.

4. When editing a block, my custom theme name and the dropdown menu appear twice under "Region Settings," along with the administration theme name. Not sure if this is a bug or not, but I am a little confused as to why it is showing up twice.

Nice to Have

1. In Simple Views, it would be great if "random" were one of the ordering options.

2. When using a layout that has sidebars, it would be great if the page content extended to the edges if sidebars were empty on a particular page, instead of just appearing empty. For example, in the Zen theme, there is logic that says, "If this block has content, show the block and assign these CSS classes; if not, don't show it, and assign these other CSS classes." Of course, page layouts can be assigned on a page-by-page basis, but it would be nice if this logic happened automatically.

3. It doesn't look like there is a way to delete custom themes, even if they are not in use. 

4. The name "Gardens Feedback Module" is a great feature, but the name is a little ambiguous. At first I thought it was a contact form to give feedback to the Drupal Gardens team, rather than a link to the regular contact form. It might be helpful to clarify.

5. Ideally, it would be great to have Google Analytics integration. However, I suppose one could get around this by just copying/pasting the regular Analytics code into one of the footer blocks and allowing the <script> tag in the input type.

6. I'd love if there was the option to create blocks of taxonomy terms and monthly archives for posts linking to those respective listings. It would be ideal if these were available as default blocks, but it would be great even if this functionality could be achieved in Simple Views.

7. The ability to import a blog form WordPress, Blogger, etc.