After nearly three years of intense community collaboration by nearly a thousand contributors, Drupal 7.0 is today officially released and ready for download!
Drupal is dead, Long Live Drupal.
This latest incarnation of the popular open source Web content management system, is now generally available and it’s free! Oh, how I love that word.
Over the years I’ve tinkered with all the major CMS systems – Joomla, WordPress, *Nuke, Magenta, Sharepoint, Mambo and of course Drupal. Joomla is the closest competitor IMHO as regards function and useability. But Drupal always wins when it comes to its extensibility – by that I mean, its ability to simply bolt in additional functions and have the website upgrading and running in a fraction of the time needed with other website Management Systems.
This site, nicklitten.com is one of hundreds of thousands of websites powered by Drupal. I’m a big fan and firmly believe its (currently) the best CMS out there. This being said, I’m quite stoked about Drupal 7 as it’s the most amazing update yet. The engine driving D7 has been tested for some time and I’ve been running it on some of my other simpler CMS sites for a while.
Some of the great new features D7 I’m most excited about:
- CCK and Views now in core. Probably the most aclaimed feature of D7 this means that displaying website data is faster and easier than ever. Views let you dynamically tailor how the data is displayed.
- Better admin with a navigation bar. The admin interface is totally restructured to make it more logical and easier to use.
- Adding images to nodes is now built in. Image handling is great if you add in modules to handle it for you but with D7 its now built in. Terrific.
- Installation of modules and themes is now possible from within the admin pages. This is a huge time saver for web-admins like me.
- It Feels slicker. Well it just does.
🙂