Trying out Drupal 7

This weekend, I decided to take a look at the freshly released Drupal 7.


I feel like the Installation Guide was improved, with the possibility to follow high-level or more in-depth instructions. The default UI got a (welcome) face-lift, and the context menus seem to be back (Contextual links module), which I applaud. The installation process is similar to Drupal 6 and the administrator pages are now more accessible through a menu at the top (Toolbar module). They open in a pop-up so you don't leave the current page and you are less affected by the layout of the current theme (Overlay module).

I'm a little disappointed by the amount of modules supporting version 7. I was expecting a wide range of modules to be fully available (due to the D7 Pledges), but it turns out a lot only have a development snapshot or an alpha version available.

Installing modules through the web-interface still feels like a hassle. You have to copy-paste the donwload URL, and then provide FTP-credentials. I use SCP on this Linux-box and didn't set up an FTP-server because that feels like taking a step back. This video made me believe that modules would install right away, but the administration page states "Installing modules and themes requires FTP access to your server". Luckily there is drush which makes it fairly easy to install modules (if you have console-access).

Upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7 looks OK. I did a test with a very basic website (even no extra modules) and all seemed to work.
The main challenge will probably be upgrading third-party modules and themes.

I was looking forward to improved support for staging/deployment/management, but didn't find any traces of this yet. We'll need to keep on helping ourselves with third-party tools, until Drupal 8 is available.

I'll need some miles with this new release to find out if it proves to be stable and practical.

Try it out here.