Drupal 7 vs Drupal 6: a first impression

Drupal 7 Alpha 1 has just been released. Although it's not the definite version, Alpha means that it is stable enough to be tested by the public. And since I'm the public, I downloaded, installed and looked at Drupal 7. These are my first impressions, together with a couple of screenshots.

The download and the installation of the files is very similar as with Drupal 6. The same directories (sites, modules, themes,...) appear, you upload them with an ftp-client, you have to make a settings.php-file and a database. But a quick look into the directories themes and modules reveals some changes in the core already: 7 more modules, and the themes Stark and Seven.

Although I'm a big fan of Drupal, I regret that the basic installation (and upgrade), although logic, still requires (too much) knowledge about file-transfers, mysql, apache-servers, 7-Zip etc. But there is some good news about this release here: once Drupal is running, it's very easy to install new themes and modules (see further).

Installation of Drupal 7

When you start the installation of Drupal itself, you see the look of the new administration-theme: gray, black, white and a touch of blue - simple. The installation is very similar to Drupal 6, the differences are in the installation-profile (standard or minimal) and the choice in database-type (mySQL or SQLite).

The welcome-screen

Ah... Garland! The good-old Drupal-theme. With the big difference that Garland became a lot more flexible than before, and that Seven became the default administration-theme. The original Drupal 6-text has been moved to the help-section where it belongs, and people get the simple message that No front page content has been created yet. A good thing, 20% of the searches pointing to my website involves how to get rid of the welcome-page. People know now. By putting Add new content so prominently it shows what it is (mostly), a Content Management System. But I should replace Change the default front page with help with Drupal, since no content has been created.

The big changes are the 2 menu-bars at the top. The black one is quite similar to the one produced by the Administration-menu module and the gray menu-bar is for shortcuts, a place to put links to the tasks you perform the most.

The administration-bar

Gone are the confusing Content management, Site building, User management and Site configuration. Instead a much more logical structure. It didn't take me more than one hour to adapt and for the record, I used half of that time to find content-types; it's not under Content, as I expected, but under Structure, just like Blocks and Taxonomy. But in the end, I liked what I saw.

Completely new is Dashboard, a place where you can drag and drop the different blocks, and see them without the necessity to put them on the site itself. It's a great place to test them out. You don't need to assign a user-role and to put them in a region. Just drag them into Dashboard.

Content: still the (artificial) difference between a Page and a Story. Instead it's called Article and Basic page now. I'm sure that I'll get searches like what is the difference between Article and Basic page. I understand the idea behind it, but it's not really necessary for me. What I also miss is an integrated text-editor, but ok, an extra module will do the trick... Great is that you can add and manage different kind of fields to the content, like you did with CCK. Fields can be added to users & taxonomy too.

Structure is about Blocks, Menus, Content-types and Taxonomy, Appearance is the new word for Themes. Several new functions extend the theme 'Garland': it's possible to apply different colors, for example, and to choose between a fixed or flexible lay-out.

Users became People (nice). Really great is the creation of another role, the Administrator. Clever! The 1st-user (the god-role) is not necessarily the administrator of a site (the site can be created by the 1st-user for somebody else).

Something else. Think about what you have to do to add new modules in D6.

1. Find, Download them from drupal.org and Unzip
2. Upload the unzipped file to your site.
3. Administer>>Site building>>Modules, and enable
4. Administer>>User management>>Permissions and set the permissions
5. Administer>>Site configuration>>by Module and configure the module. and sometimes
6. Help

That's all over now, in D7 everything is located under Modules. Above the list a new link: Install new module. That brings you to this screen:

Beautiful!!! Download, Unzip and upload in one go! No fiddling with files anymore, and it's the same system to upload new themes. I don't know if it works for FCKeditor, a more complex module (I couldn't try because it's not available for D7 yet), but it is a great solution for most other modules.

After the upload (and running the update.script) you go to the Modules-list to do the rest. Here a picture of a detail of the modules-list.

On the right, next to the module, Help, Permissions and Configure.

Conclusion

Some features I didn't examine yet, like the new way of dealing with private files, the implementation of pictures and Test stalled when I tried to run it. But I saw already enough changes to be impressed with the improved functionallity of Drupal 7. Nevertheless, I (personally) hope that in later stage we'll see an easier installation and the implementation of a text-editor.

Things I liked the most:

• the User-interface, which is state of the art. Only after working with D7, I realise how 'messy' D6 actually is. In D7, logic prevails.
• The default implementation of CCK
• The way how one can install modules and themes with D7 is a giant leap forward.

If you want to download Drupal 7 Alpha 1 or read more about this release, go to Drupal.org.