Dawn of Drupal 7

2009/09

Between a CMS and a development framework, Drupal is getting increasinly popular among individual users and businesses. Starting from September 1st, Drupal 7 enters its last phase of development : code stabilisation. Let's review the main improvements planned for this release.

Flexibility first

Drupal is a GPL-licensed community open source project started in 2001. In 2007, Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert founded the company Acquia to provide Drupal related support and services to businesses. In 2007 and 2008, Drupal won the Best Open Source CMS Award from Packt Publishing.

Drupal's main characteristic is its extreme flexibility: in contrary to most CMSes, and like the Linux kernel or Firefox, Drupal itself includes only a minimal set of features and the extensions one will add will define how the system will look and behave ; this way we are not limited by a given way of doing things, or to only one kind of websites. With Drupal, one can create, as efficiently, a blog, a community website with forums and internal messaging, an e-commerce website or a complex intranet with numerous user groups and access permissions.

Drupal was designed to easily allow to access, extend and customise any part of the application. Therefore it is not surprising that a community of developers was quickly attracted and released more than 4000 modules, from theme modification or notification message display to a complete rewrite of the workflow system of the content structure. Modules installation and management is very easy ; in contrary to a development framework it is possible to build almost any kind of website without writing a line of code.

User Experience

Drupal's flexibility had long had a downside: usability and consistency of the interface weren't always satisfying. One of the main goal of Drupal 7 is improving on this aspect.

A user experience team was created, the interface was audited by specialised tools, professionals were hired by Acquia for this task, and the result is a less crowded, more intuitive and more functional administration interface. Especially, new elements were introduced, like vertical tabs for secondary options, and a better management of WYSIWYG editors.

Fields integration

One of the most popular modules for Drupal 6 is called Content Construction Kit, or CCK. The latter makes it easy to customise its page templates, or in Drupal slang, its content types (for exemple a blog post, a product, a biography, etc). CCK allows to add many types of fiels to content types : text fields, dropdown lists, checkboxes, numeric fields, links to related pages or users...

This feature was considered important enough to be included as part as the core of Drupal 7. In addition to make the content structure much more flexible, the source code was improved to make it faster and lighter.

Databases

Drupal 7 introduces a new database interface based on PDO, PHP5's databases abstraction layer. In addition to MySQL and PostgreSQL, Drupal 7 will support SQLite and the door is open to Oracle and MS-SQL.

Among other benefits for business usage, using the new interface will bring support for transactions and easier databases clustering.

Modules

When Drupal 6 was released, it did not gain adoption quickly, just because there weren't enough modules available for it. To migrate their modules, module developers were waiting for enough users, and to use Drupal 6 users were waiting for enough modules.

Not to repeat the same error again, an initiative was started to ensure all major modules will be available for Drupal 7 on the day it will be released. This way Drupal 7 will be used much more quickly

Commercial offer

Lastly, thanks to Acquia, businesses can benefit from support and maintenance, hosted full-text search tool (based on Apache SolR) and anti-spam offers. Acquia also provides a prepackaged version of Drupal and its most popular modules, in the form of a software stack installing and configuring automatically a complete production environment (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.)

Conclusion

Drupal 7 promises to be a very mature release. With a dedicated company backing the project, improvements on user experience and features that businesses will like, it is bound to attract even more users.

Useful links