Drupal 7 test drive
The long expecting Drupal 7 was finally release on Jan 5, 2011. The news has got the entire community heat up. For a lot of web designers and developers out there, this is like MJ's new album amount pop music fans or the new generation of Air Jordan for basketball lovers. Drupal.org has also made major changes on its UI, but without the test drive who's to say what's good and what not. With a load of excitement and curiosity, I down a copy of Drupal 7 to test out.
The unzip installation package is about 13MB on disk. The installation process is pretty standard and painless. Set up file permissions, define database connection, and then you are good to go. Drupal 7 relays on some advance features supported by the web server. Before you install Drupal 7, make sure you have the server reaches Drupal 7's minimum requirement.
- Apache 1.3 or Apache 2.x hosted on UNIX/Linux, OS X, or Windows.
- Drupal core will work using IIS 5, IIS 6, or IIS 7 if PHP is configured correctly.
- MySQL 5.0.15 or higher, and requires the PDO database extension for PHP.
- PostgreSQL 8.3 or higher.
- SQLite 3.x
- PHP 5.3 or higher.
For full details on system requirement, visit this post on Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/requirements
The new admin interface looks a lot like Wordpress. The administer menu is no longer by default on the left. Instead it stay across the top at all times. This design is different from the Administration menu for Drupal 6. It still takes a few clicks before you get to what you look for. Drupal 7 allows custom shortcut on the dashboard. You can now quickly access to frequently used functionality a lot quicker. The new menu system is designed in a way strongly focuses on productivity as opposed to Drupal 6 where features are organized to reflect how they are related to each other.
Many useful modules in Drupal 6 have been included into core in Drupal 7 such as CCK, Images and Actions. It surprises me that Views didn't make it to core as it's extremely useful in many, if not all, of my Drupal projects. Other userful modules such as Workflow, Calendar and Ubercart are still under development. If you are planing on upgrading a Drupal 6 CMS to 7, make sure to upgrade all modules to Drupal 7 compatible. Although integration makes Drupal fatter, it does save a lot of time on the initial set up. Developers no longer need to download the latest version of each module one by one. It's all packed and shipped in one box. Again, productivity.
Wordpress does a good job on letting system admin to review/install/uninstall/update extra theme and add-ons from Wordpress.org directly via the admin interface. I was expecting it or even better from Druapl 7. Didn't happen, although Drupal 7 let you install new modules by entering the URL besides FTPing the package to the server.
System performance seen to be improved but the admin UI which is powered by jQuery UI has a little delay on event handling. We all know jQuery UI makes the web prettier and fancier, and that could sometime be annoying some time and counter productivity when too much visual effect apply.
Overall Drupal 7 has improved in all ways and will get better and better as more modules will become available. It is a framework that is update today's web standard, more importantly, and hopefully, it works, just like it had.
