Drupal 7 Alpha Is Here
Drupal fans are excited about the latest Drupal 7 release. This release has been long awaited and has been in development for almost 2 years. The latest release is only an alpha release and still have a number of issues that need to be resolved. While most of the errors have already been fixed, it should not be used for production sites because some of the outstanding known errors are related to security issues. Before the final version of Drupal 7 is released, it is expected to have one more alpha release and several beta releases.
The new features of Drupal 7 have the community excited and testing out Drupal 7 to help speed up the release of a stable version. Here are some of the features that have Drupal users ready to upgrade.
Custom Fields
Drupal 7 gives users that ability to add custom fields much in the same way as the CCK or Content Construction Kit. The fields have been expanded to include content types, users, taxonomy terms, and several other entities. All of these fields are also supported for translations.
New User Interface
Improving the user experience has been a main focus of the new Drupal release. The new admin theme, overlay module, dashboard, and shortcut bar have been designed to create a much more user-friendly interface and simplified way to modify content.
Update Manager
This has been an improvement on Drupal 6's Update module and has been improved so that the new update manager will also allow you to install and upgrade modules and themes instantly.
Handling Images
Native imaging handling has become part of the Drupal 7 core. Image fields can now easily be added to content as well as be scaled, cropped, and other styling with ease.
Front End and Back End Improvements to the Core
Front End – New API rendering allows for highly granular theming. Core template files have also been changed to create a better semantic markup. There is also built in RDFa support that includes jQuery UI and an improved AJAX framework. There are also several additional accessibility enhancements that make Drupal 7 the most accessible release ever.
Back End – Drupal 7 has a new layered database that has resolved almost all of the problems with the Drupal 6 database layer, as well as other associated problems with automatic testing framework, PHP stream-based file API that can support both public and private files at the same time and much more.
The Drupal 7 alpha release has had great reviews and once it has become stabilized it will finally be on par with many of the standard options that bloggers have gotten used to with other popular CMS like Wordpress, making Drupal a legitimate alternative again.
new Drupal 7
I have tried new Drupal 7. new admin interface is much better. New fatures that excites me the most are the core custom fileds and core image handling. Those are the features that should definitively be in the core of such a BIG CMS like Drupal.
Post new comment