I created an update site for my cmdline_tools project (docs). This project contains a few routines that are handy when working interactively on the IDL command line. The update site for the Workbench is:

Name: cmdline_tools
URL: http://updates.idldev.com/cmdline_tools

If you are unfamiliar with using an update site, follow the directions in this post, just replacing the name and URL with the above.

This distribution includes one new thing for me—it contains a DLM compiled for 64-bit Mac OS X, 32-bit Windows, and both 32- and 64-bit Linux. If you use one of those platforms and have IDL 7.1, it should just automatically load the appropriate DLM for your platform. To try it out, type

IDL> print, mg_termcolumns()
100

I think the update mechanism basically works in IDL 7.1. The only problem I have run into now is that on Linux platforms when installing as non-root, you have to manually put the downloaded code in your IDL_PATH/IDL_DLM_PATH.