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Drupal 7 (A.K.A. D7)
Drupal is a open source content management system with , by far, the biggest online community support. We consider ourselves a big supporter of Drupal and we are anxiously waiting for the Drupal 7 to be released. We couldn't wait anymore and took a sneak peak at D7 Alpha 5, that came out just recently on May 23rd. With no doubt one of the reasons why we have installed Drupal 7 Alpha 5 is to chip in the effort to test the new cms.And we will share our findings with the developers and the Drupal community.
The Drupal team is acting very cautiously and waiting for all the critical bugs to be resolved before releasing the first Beta version of Drupal 7 . As of today , July 19th ,2010 , there seems to be 44 critical issues on the list before going beta. Obviously, the "on or about June 21st , 2010" isn't a realistic anymore. (As a matter of fact it is way behind us!) I have felt to need to take a closer look at the "critical issues list" . I now have a better understanding of why the list continuous to go up each day or the number of items in the critical list doesn't go down faster. It seems like the developers are now also trying to fix the bugs on the modules that come by default with the new edition of Drupal. I think it is wrong to start working on the bugs without even going Beta. But this is my humble opinion. Another reason is the number of qualified developpers who are trully engaged in fixing the critical issues. There are a very few names in the list.
According to the developers of D7 they will not release Drupal 7 without first releasing at least one Release Candidate. Developers of Drupal 7 would rather wait and make sure the software is throughly tested and all the known critical bugs are resolved and it has great documentation in place for the community.And this is what we would all expect from them. When D7 will be released it will be rock solid. In other words the wait might be a bit longer than June 21st but it is well worth the wait.
If you would like to read more Drupal 7 and how you can help. You can always refer to the Drupal 7 Alpha Release 5's official page
Here is a quick sneakpeak at Drupal 7 via screenshots:
There aren't ground breaking improvements for as far as theming is concerned in Drupal 7. Never the less the changes are worth mentioning here since they are pretty cool improvements over Drupal 6.
Some of the highlights to changes in "theming in Drupal 7" are as follows:
* Themes such as Marvin, Chameleon and Push Button are no longer there. These themes weren't really popular and modern enough to be converted to Drupal 7.
* The main core themes are Garland , Stark and Seven. And they are gathered under the "Appeareances" tab on th top menu.
- Stark is a theme that has nothing in it , it's sole purpose is to show us what Drupal has as it's markup.
- Seven: Is a new minimalistic admin theme that is very clean and user friendly.
* Naming convetions have been replaced with more logical names. Primary links and Secondary links have been renamed as main menu and secondary menu . Some variable names have been renamed for easier understanding. i.e. Sidebar left and right has been replaced with first and side bar second because it made more sense for right to left languages.
* Ability to make changes to a menu by rolling over the menu and click on a link that is located on the top.
* Blocks become more fundemental in Drupal 7. i.e. Footer, mission statement can now only be displayed when the search module is enabled it gets automatically enabled in a theme as a block. Content is a region and main page content is a block in Drupal 7.
* Jquery UI library comes bundled with Drupal 7 Core.
For more and detailed information on Drupal 7 theming please see Drupal 7 Theming
Our first impression by looking at the back-end of Drupal 7 is as follows:
The back-end of Drupal 7 has been drastically changed compared to Drupal 6 in a good way. Overall, the back-end is much more modern and much more user friendly and intuitive. It is still the samebeautiful Drupal we came to love but much more fun to work with.
Here is a summary of the main improvements of Drupal 7 as described by Dries Buytaert (credit goes to starting to work on drupal 7 )
- Better media handling
- Custom content types in core
- WYSIWYG editor
- Better performance
- Better tools to structure/organize content
- Basic Views like module
- Automatic upgrade functionality
- Improved node access system
- Better internal APIs
- Better external APIs (import/export, web services)
- Usability
What are the most popular features of Drupal 7 ? (Please see features of drupal 7 for more details)
* Some well supported modules, that you previously had to install separetly in previous versions of Drupal are now part of core in Drupal 7. (i.e. token, poorman's cron and filefield modules are all part of the core of Drupal 7)
Note : We will continue updating this page on a regular basis . So, stay tuned and visit this page often if you would like to stay up to date with the latest news about Drupal 7
