Don't ask me why but I've just finished installing the latest recommend version of Drupal 7. I'd been hearing quite a bit of chatter about it recently (after the initial buzz at the beginning of the year (and after the constant comments on the dev channel the year before that)). So I decided that maybe now would be a good time to see what improvements had been made - In my opinion there was a lot needing to be done from Drupal 6...
Before getting started however I did a little bit of research to see what others were saying, and it seemed unanimous really:
- Drupal 7 is cleaner and more though-out than D6
- Scalability is better, but performance is slightly worse.
- There are a lot of modules that have been ported (D7 promise), but many useful ones are still at alpha/beta stages.
- Module Installation and dashboard are +1 by all
From my point of view it only took me about 30 minutes this morning to get a clean install working using SQLite with my "must have" modules installed (Views,CTools,Panels). Which is far better than my experiences before with D6. I quickly created some new Views (like the new interface for Views!), tied those in to new pages controlled by Panels (Panels is now even more extensive!) exposed via Blocks (Blocks are blocks). I got Drupal's basic search working (I haven't looked in to anything more complicated like FuzzySearch altho I am currently looking in to Google Custom Search). And I then customised the main menu to be as I wanted. So all in all, good, and needed minimal time to look things up. However, I always found this to be the case really with Drupal. It's very quick to put together the large, general bits and pieces of a site... Your time just gets eaten up by editing or fixing the more smaller and specific issues which take forever to find.
Anyway, I haven't had too much time to play around now. Nothing from the code point of view. But so far the admin/front-end is a lot cleaner but totally re-arranged and I will admit to getting a little/lot lost. At least there is the feeling that once I've learned the interface it will be clearer and quicker to navigate than D6. The most annoying thing for me with D6 is that nothing was where I'd expected it to be.. whether that's because non-techy people just have very strange thought processes ;) or D6 just was very strange in itself. So D7 is an improvement... I just expect things in D6 places and haven't found everything yet ;)
So overall... since my check in January it still seemed to me that for use on a large-scale projects things would probably ok as long as you have time for bespoke modules (or you have flexibility with how things need to work), for smaller and personal CMS projects it would definitely be my choice just because it seems far more thought out than anything else out there. The "install module from URL" feature is very nice, but quite why this didn't exist previously I have no idea... it's hardly a new concept or difficult to implement, especially when you have complete control over where and how your module developers upload their contributions. I don't mean to sound negative but much of what I have seen so far in D7 is just common sense, obviously achieving common sense on a large scale project is quite difficult if you don't start out with that premise. So I'd say the "hats off" achievement isn't so much the actual new features I've come across, it's getting them all ready and working in harmony across such an open network... which is what they've achieved.
