The wait is over! Just over three years after the release of version 6, and a year after the first alpha, we have Drupal 7. For those not in the know, Drupal is one of the big names in content management systems* and Pedalo’s first choice for large sites. Its creator and community leader Dries Buytaert puts Drupal’s penetration at 1% of websites, a significant amount. With the latest version he’s hoping to see Drupal expand both in the low and high end of the market. Drupal 6 had many great improvements over its previous release: so what can the latest and greatest boast?
Here’s what I’m particularly looking forward to.
- Better content handling — A perennial topic of *cough* polite conversation in the Drupal community has been its handling of content entry. I’m talking here about how you get your beautiful news article with picture, caption, and video, into the website. WordPress has its own editor. Joomla has its own editor. Drupal says, ‘I cannot be everything to all people, so I will let the community develop whatever editors they need.’ The position has a lot of merit, but does mean that there’s no single great way to do content entry. Often you find half the features you’re after are implemented as plugins for system x while the other half for system y — but you need them both together. With version 7, we finally have core support for images, and the impressive media module comes of age (well hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for a stable release).
- Better user experience — There have been complaints that Drupal is intimidating for the uninitiated, and in parts downright difficult to use. While it’s true that the development agency can ‘mould’ Drupal to make sure the UX is exactly as they want it, it will be nice to have some saner defaults. And I know a lot of effort has been put into this area.
- Better PHP 5.3 compatibility — Oh it’s a pain in the neck having to maintain servers with PHP 5.2. Although D6 core has been compatible with PHP 5.3 for some time, many, many of the contributed modules are not (meaning that a lot of folk configure their servers not to update beyond 5.2.x). With D7 we can finally release our servers from their prison, and use the latest version of PHP!
- Later versions of jQuery — It could be quite annoying to get the latest versions of jQuery UI to run on D6. We now have (pretty much) up-to-date versions of jQuery and jQuery UI.
- Improved file handling — There are new hooks for file loading, saving and validation. More hooks means more flexibility!
- Web-based module installation/upgrade — Well to be honest I normally use Drush for all this fun, but that’s not easy for command-line-aphobics: the new process is considerably more convenient allowing upload of modules or automatic download from an URL. This lowers the bar of entry to the Drupal community, which is vital if the product is to continue to grow and develop.
Check out this Drupal 7 Marketing Video from Lullabot.
I expect we won’t be making any sites using Drupal 7 for at least a few months: it’s good to give time for any remaining bugs in core to be discovered and fixed, and to allow contrib modules to have stable releases – but I’d be very happy if we had a live site on D7 at some point in Spring.
Click here to read more articles about Drupal including “Why Drupal is Sooo Good!”
* The Drupal community seems to prefer the term content management framework to highlight its greater versatility (and to be different, of course).
