Drupal 7 Alpha
Drupal and WordPress are the two Content Management Systems I use regularly when developing sites, and as WordPress updates to 2.9.1, Drupal has recently released the alpha version of the upcoming Drupal 7. Having heard a lot about the progress over the last few months, and of the contribution to the D7UX project by Mark Boulton, I was curious to see what the alpha version would be like and yesterday I downloaded a copy to play with in a local environment and there are a few major noticeable differences from previous versions straight away.
Installation:
There are two install profiles to choose from, Standard and Minimal. There are subtle differences between the two profiles, with more modules enabled in the standard installation as opposed to the minimal option. The minimal profile begins with only 3 modules enabled; block, database logging and update manager whilst the standard profile has the majority of common modules enabled by default. Depending on the site purpose, I’d imagine that 90% of the time the standard profile would be appropriate however the minimal profile would be useful for small sites who have no need for a large number of features.
Overlay:
One of the biggest differences in Drupal 7 is the admin overlay screen, which places the admin options within a javascript overlay on the site.
Personally I could see the reasoning behind this option of providing a quick snapshot of the site, and by allowing customisation of the options available on the dashboard it could be customised to the site in use to provide the most common information quickly. However it’s not something I particularly enjoyed using and immediately visited the modules page to disable it and return to the “page” version of the admin screen (Although it took me a while to realise it was a module, but that’s probably just me!).
CCK Built-In:
Probably the two most common modules installed in previous Drupal versions was CCK and Views, and a large part of CCK is now installed as standard allowing the creation of custom fields and content types, giving Drupal more flexibility straight out the box. However, content types is listed under the structure area of the admin options and not in content as I first thought.
Images:
Image handling has been built into Drupal 7, and probably one of the most useful additions is the ability to add an image field to content types so that images can be associated or displayed with content. This is a particularly welcome addition for me as I was struggling with this particular problem only last week.
Options such as maximum dimensions file types and upload size can be configured, as well as the destination of any images uploaded.
Themes:
Having seen Garland far too many times for my liking, it’s good to see some new themes included into Drupal 7, the most welcome addition being the Stark theme, similar to the excellent WordPress theme Starkers by Elliot Jay Stocks. The stark theme is almost completely devoid of CSS making it an excellent starting point for theme creation and allowing a blank canvas.
On quick inspection it appears that a lot of the markup has been cleaned up and made more semantic but I’ve not looked properly at this as of yet to give a thorough review. However, this was badly needed as some of the previous markup generated was horrendous and made styling unnecessary difficult.
Updating:
The ability to update and install modules and themes direct from the admin interface is a welcome addition to Drupal 7, with the option to either upload via url or by browsing to the folder on the local machine. This is useful as it removes the barrier of ftp for site managers and moderators, however it would be useful to search the modules section on drupal.org and install automatically similar to the plugins in WordPress, however that may come and this is certainly a step in the right direction.
Overall:
Having only had a very brief taster of Drupal 7 so far it’s certainly an improvement over previous versions and the addition of Mark Boulton, Leisa Reichelt and their team to the user experience project was a major plus as the user experience is vastly improved, it’s not perfect but certainly a lot better than it was.
