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Seven improvements for end users in Drupal 7

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It has been officially announced that January 5th 2011 will be etched in our memory as the release date of Drupal 7.0. This will introduce many of improvements for everyone: developers, themers, system administrators and end users. Time to take a look at 7 improvements that Drupal 7 brings for end users.

1. New core themes

No less than three new core themes have sneaked their way into Drupal 7, each targeted at it's own audience:

Bartik

The new default front end theme (replacing Garland). This beautiful looking theme with tons of regions and color module support should allow everyone to create a pleasant and modern looking site without the hassle of creating their own theme.

Seven

The first administration theme shipped with Drupal core. A product from the Drupal 7 User Experience Project. Clean and no sidebars!

Stark

A CSS only theme. Ideal to test Drupal 7's default markup, or from which to create your own subtheme.

2. Improved administration interface

By means of a survey in 2007 started by Dries Buytaert, it became clear that one of the focus points for the next version should be Usability and User Experience, and in particular that of the administration interface. The Drupal 7 User Experience Project was thus started and people such as Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt were hired to guide the project to achieve its goals. From that project and from the various activity in the issue queue were born a few modules to enhance the experience.

Toolbar, Shortcuts, Overlay, Contextual links, hook_admin_paths

One of the most irritating experiences for some beginner Drupal users is having to switch between the administration and front end theme. Three modules and one hook in Drupal 7 finally close that gap.

After enabling these modules you get a toolbar at the top of every page with the top level links of the Management menu (think like the Administration menu in Drupal 6). Below that toolbar you get a bunch of shortcuts where every user can collect his/her favorite and most used pages. Using the overlay you never have to leave the front end page you're on. Once you access an administration page, it opens in an overlay on top of your current page and once you close it after performing your tasks, you're back on the page where you were.

Contextual links give you quick access to configure parts on a page. When you hover over a block a popup appears allowing you to edit the block, when you hover over an article teaser, the popup contains a link to edit the article, etc.

In previous versions of Drupal, the "administration environment" was constructed of every page which URL started with /admin (except for the content editing pages). Developers can now use hook_admin_paths to mark certain paths as belonging to the administration interface. Expect a few modules in contrib that will build on this to provide a user interface for non-programmers.

Vertical tabs

Vertical tabs were already available as a contributed module in Drupal 6, but are now part of core. They make long forms shorter. You will notice this when writing articles, pages, … since the node form is now a lot shorter.

Improved navigation

The whole administration menu (called "Management" in 7, "Navigation" in 6 and before) is reorganized in a much logical structure.

More drag & drop

Drag & drop was introduced in Drupal 6, it's now available on more pages.

3. Improved installation and updates

Drupal 7 ships with a full-fledged Update manager, meaning you can now update your modules and themes without doing the whole "download, unpack, upload module and run update.php" routine. Once the update manager announces an update of a certain module, you can tell it to update the particular module using the web interface, and the routine is done for you by Drupal itself behind the scenes. The Update manager can also be used to install new modules and themes. Just provide it with the URL of a module or theme or upload the tarball and you're done.

Drupal also ships with two installation profiles: you can choose the minimal profile to install Drupal with as few modules enabled as possible, or choose the default profile that enables some modules and creates some content types for you.

The Drupal core installer is also rewritten as an API which means that you can install Drupal from the command line. Try it with drush site-install.

4. CCK in core (now Fields)

Tears of joy! Our beloved Content Construction Kit (CCK) is now part of core. It is re-baptized as Fields and it rocks.

It's a whole new beast because without extra modules you can now not only add fields to all your content types, but also to users and taxonomy terms.

What the heck… it's written so generic that you can now actually add fields on practically everything (that supports it). Start the (r)evolution.

5. Lots of contrib module functionality in core

A lot of functionality existing in Drupal 6 as contributed module, has been ported to Drupal 7. It is actually so much that more than 50 contrib modules (probably even a lot more) have become obsolete for Drupal 7.

To mention only a few: functionality appears in Drupal 7 as "Image styles", complete with preview functionality and all.

Those always forgetting to set up cron or not able to, will be happy to know that 's functionality is now available in core. As soon as you have installed Drupal, cron is being set up to run every 3 hours.

6. Better user management

One of the most frustrating things in Drupal 6 was the 'administer nodes' permission which gives users more rights then you want. In Drupal 7 this issue has been solved by splitting this permission into more permissions like 'Bypass content access control', 'Administer content types', 'Administer content', 'Access the content overview page', …

Instead of only have a machine name in Drupal 6, permissions now have a human readable name and description and may also have a warning: 'Warning: Give to trusted roles only; this permission has security implications'.

To make your site more secure, you can now keep the User 1 account secret and give people "User 1 like permissions" using the Administrator role, a role that receives all permissions by default, something that was only possible in Drupal 6 using the Admin role module.

New in Drupal 7 is also that users can cancel their own account. With that also comes support to handle the cancellation of accounts (by the administrator or the owner of the account himself). You are given a few options about how Drupal needs to treat the user's content and profile.

7. Better support for multilingual sites

Drupal 6, maintained by Gábor Hojtsy, put a lot of focus on making multilingual sites with Drupal easier and better. In Drupal 7 quite a bit of cool stuff was introduced again.

Language negotiation got improved significantly. You can now completely configure what gets precedence when Drupal decides what the active language is, based on the URL, a session variable, user preference, browser settings, ...

Something you will notice as soon as you install Drupal 7 is that we now have timezone support. This also means Drupal 7 supports daylight saving time.

The translation system in Drupal 7 now also is aware of the context a certain string is used in. So for example the string "May" may be used as the month "May" in one context and used as the verb "May" in another one. In Dutch this would translate to "mei" en "mogen".

To close off this impressive round of improvements to the language system, we can also note that Search now also can work language aware.

More improvements

This list of improvements is part of a presentation that Krimson will do at the Drupal 7 release party they are organizing together with Calibrate. The presentation will highlight 42 more improvements which gives us together with the ones above 7 x 7 reasons to kick off your next project in Drupal 7. Join us!

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About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web