Drupal 7 made a striking launch: What is there for you?

The wait is over now. Drupal is celebrating version 7 so you do!  Now bloggers have enough reason to rejoice as they can build everything from personal blogs to advanced web applications or enterprise applications. But, do you think the journey from 6.2 to 7 was comfortable for Drupal Developers?  Has it been able to fix up the issues with Drupal 6? Even if the latest version seems successful, can it replace the importance of WordPress?  A series of big questions lies for us to solve in future!

Before we go into detail what Drupal 7 has in store for you, let us know – what drove the decision to upgrade the version within a short span of time (just a month)?

Drupal Reborn:

After Drupal 6.20 released last year December, bloggers were voraciously waiting for the robust, versatile and user-friendly CMS to power their sites.  Yes, the reason of waiting was justified.  Many users tend to choose Word Press for their sites (just because of its simplicity) and Drupal 6.20 could not do much of it. It is a cold war between two free and open source CMS and Drupal developers are left nothing better than multiple challenges as follows:

• Will Drupal be able to gain market share among the masses if not the mind share at least?
• Do the latest versions promise improvements with security and JavaScript Speed?
• Can it fix up the existing numerous bugs?
• And, finally, how soon Drupal 7 is going to be launched?

The test releases for Drupal 7 started back in March 2009. After a number of beta testing (Beta 1, 2, 3) and release of candidate 1,2,3,4 finally, Drupal 7 was officially released on 5^th January 2011.

Next, is what? With close to 8500 modules, over 1000 themes and 5500 developers Drupal is already doing business in 228 countries all over the world.  Will upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7 make any big difference to these figures?

Drupal 7 with massive features:

Drupal 7 is claiming itself to be more friendly and powerful. They are promising much convincing content management platform         for you to build almost any king of website, blogs or microsites.

Let us see what starters have to say on this? What is their first-hand experience with Drupal 7? Does it work at all? Or, it is just hype over masses?

User’s recommendations

A. Drupal 7 comes up with list of new features. Among those, few definitely bagged more attention so far. These are Image Styles (ImageCache), Field API (CCK), , Tokens, the new Admin UI, Update Management and Resource Description Framework – in – attributes (RDFa)etc.

B. Collectively, there were several smaller changes done with the features which makes Drupal a complete website building platform.  It gives out much more robust foundation with minimum need to add several contributed modules.

C. Size matters. There is a big difference in the size of the unpacked archives between Drupal 6.17 and Alpha 5 version of Drupal 7.  The code difference is 5.13 MB (Drupal v6 – 3.38 MB and Drupal v7 a5 -8.51 MB) which indicates Drupal users have to learn many new things from the newest version.

D. Drupal 7 is fantastic, though it is not picture perfect as of today.  But, as compared to Drupal 6 the improvement is humongous for sure.  A lot of things have been altered and it is much quicker to work with it now. Settings and configurations have become more logical. In fact in many places only one settings page is enough whereas earlier it was split into many pages.

E. Vertical tabs with drop down menus have replaced long lists of radio buttons.

F. UI (User Interface) is also much more compact than previous version. Now you do not need to switch tabs or scroll up and down.

G. The over lay has been great. Now you can gracefully work with content, perform various administrative works; add modules, features and almost anything you like and then get back to the page you started with. It is so easy and smooth.

Over all, Drupal 7 has done a commendable job and developer’s effort into it is praiseworthy.  Those who used Drupal 6 will definitely show more interests in this.

If you have used Drupal 7, I would like to hear from you about your experiences. Sharing will always improve our knowledgebase and in turn put a new milestone for Drupal.

Author: Sanat Singha is a SEO content writer who shares his views on latest CMS versions. Drupal 7 has changed the way web designers in UK used to treat CMS for their client’s websites. If you are looking for SEO Web Design UK services, he recommends you to visit http://jandbuk.com/ for best of the UK SEO services.