Drupal 7: news from the front

    Finally, the development of Drupal 7 has reached the point where the result can be set and tried (before that, many times I tried to install the current build, but the errors killed hope before the installation was completed). So I tell everyone interested what’s new in Drupal.

    First of all, a little about the development cycle. In early September, Code Freeze was announced: it stopped accepting patches that add or change the functionality and API of Drupal. After that, patches of strictly limited subjects were accepted until October 15 (to bring the work to the end), and now only bug fixes are used. A few months before the release, there are many problems, but there is hope that the automated testing frameworks introduced to this version will help to fix them faster. This year's release will not be for sure, and beta is unlikely to be in time.

    The main changes for Drupal are tuning for users ’wishes, integrating the functionality of very popular custom modules into the system’s core and polishing the most disgusting corners of its software interfaces. The direction of "half-framework, half-cms" remains unchanged.

    So, what users will see:

    A new admin theme . Both the visual design (it has become much more modern) and the logic of work have changed:


    Now a panel with links to popular sections of the menu is always hanging from the top. The admin panel itself was reconfigured, the sections "content", "structure", "users" and "view" were separately rendered.





    It seemed logical to me, but slightly unusual for seasoned Drupalists (although I seem to relearn very quickly). It is frustrating, however, that the menu above is not a drop-down: I myself always put the admin_menu module, which draws a less logical (in the old logic), but more convenient because of the menu items that are opened. But the second row of links (shortcuts) can be customized.

    Further. Now the functionality of the Content module (CCK) is built into the Drupal core , and we can create types of content with various fields:

    Among the types of fields there is a “file” and “image”. Yes, files and pictures can be attached to the content from the box. Moreover, the functionality of the image_cache module will be built into Drupal, which will prepare various versions of images for previews, resizes, etc.

    From the inside out, it’s terribly important to us that the taxonomy and user profile fields are now also content fields. All this is called the Field API (this is the main new API in the new Drupal release) and saves us from one of the modules, which had to be installed by almost everyone, and at the same time from the “Do it with CCK / write by hand” holivar.

    By the way, the standard content types have changed a bit: now Story is called Article more understandable, and by default a tag field has been added for them. Wordpress, well, great. For convenience, Path and Search modules now work by default.

    An automatic update of the modules and the kernel is being prepared. Users will be notified of new versions by email. Cron.php cannot be started without a security key (or you can not run it at all - the new Drupal launches it itself on one of the user's requests, if it has not been called for a long time), and installation and update scripts, on the contrary, began to work from the command line.

    Explanations have appeared in the sheet of access rights! Urya!


    A new section with regional settings has appeared:


    Changes are also visible in the interface of the site itself: for example, for all editable elements - blocks, menus and content - corresponding links appeared. Conveniently.


    By the way, the block editing interface itself has become much better - firstly, more logical, and secondly, finally you can pull the block out of it into the desired region:


    Finally, one of the most pleasant news was the revision of the huge form of adding and editing content. Well, that’s really timely:


    What was removed: old themes, customizing the theme for each user separately, limiting the minimum length of the content title, the choice to "include beautiful URLs" (ask!).

    Drupal has undergone a significant change in the database access API (previously, programmers had to regexp! Correct the requests of other modules). It has become much more transparent and more correct. However, there are no significant improvements in performance. Those who want to use Drupal for high-loaded projects (and there are more and more of them recently, by the way) are still forced to add their own cache and load-lowering receivers. However, work in this direction is underway: in addition to the ability to use other DBMS engines and scale MySQL more flexibly thanks to the new API, a lot of work is being done to integrate external search indexers (the Apache Solr module, like many others, will be ready for Drupal 7 release day), and the Views module needed by many in the next incarnation will have advanced caching and support for various data sources - it will be possible to get data directly from the same Solr or, for example, Sphinx. Unfortunately, it's too early to look at the new Views.

    Of course, it is too early to use the new version as a platform for projects, even if the development cycle is long enough. But a closer look is worth starting now.

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