Drupal has announced that Drupal 7 is the best version of drupal yet and it's  easier and more powerful than ever. Hundreds of developers have contributed to making Drupal easier and more powerful than ever.

Drupal is an open source Content Management System written in PHP. Yes, another one. However, Drupal was one of the first good CMSs and it became a popular blogging and social community platform following its launch in 2001. Many popular sites use it today including The White House, The Economist, The New York Observer, HowToDoThings.com and Linux Journal.

Actually what's new in drupal 7? Here are the list  of some major changes and new features added in drupal 7.

Drupal 7 New Features

With a refined and more intuitive user interface and hundreds of enhancements under the hood, Drupal has never been more powerful.

• Easy to use

  A totally revamped administrative interface lets you and your audience navigate functionality with ease.
  Update modules and themes directly from within admin.

• Flexible content

  Define your own content types with the new Field API.
  Add custom data fields not only to content but also to users, comments, taxonomies and more.

• Images and files

  Drupal 7 supports image handling out of the box.
  You can mix private/public files and store things directly on alternative filesystems such as S3.

• Built to scale

  Support for advanced caching, master/slave replication, reverse-proxy and content delivery networks.
  Handle more anonymous traffic with lazy sessions.

Drupal 7 Major Changes:

Here is a summary of changes introduced to Drupal 7. You can also see the complete Drupal change log.

New Minimum System Requirements:

This is not a complete list of requirements. Please read the complete list of requirements.

• Database: MySQL 5.0.15 or PostgreSQL 8.3
• PHP Version 5.2 or higher
• PHP Memory: 40M - 64M

Security:

• More secure implementation for scheduled tasks (cron.php).
• More secure password system.
• More secure log-in system.
• Modules can be updated via the web.

Usability:

• Administrative links to edit existing page elements are now available on each web page, without having to go to an administration page first.
• Improved support for integration of WYSIWYG editors.
• Added more drag-and-drop for administrative tasks.
• Permissions now have the ability to handle more meta-data (permissions now have a description).
• User 1 created as part of the installation process.
• Added features to the default install profile (tagging on the Article content type).
• Setting up automated task runs (cron) can now be achieved via Drupal's configuration alone, without having to install any scripts on the web server.
• Redesigned password strength validator to make it kinder and gentler, and clearer.
• Renamed "input formats" to "text formats".
• Added support for default text formats to be assigned on a per-role basis.
• Moved text format permissions to the main permissions page
• Added "vertical tabs", a reusable interface component that features automatic summaries and increases usability.
• Improved time zone support
• Removed per-user themes: Contributed modules with similar functionality are available.
• Added new "Shortcuts" module to allow user to create their own menu for the pages they visit the most.

 

 

Database:

• Added query builders for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE, and SELECT queries.
• Support for master/slave replication, transactions, multi-insert queries,delayed inserts, and other features.
• Added support for the SQLite database engine.
• Default to InnoDB engine, rather than MyISAM, on MySQL when available for greater scalability and data integrity.

Several Performance Improvements Implemented

Documentation:

• Hook API documentation now included in Drupal core.

News aggregator:

• Added OPML import functionality for RSS feeds.
• Added feed update options.

Search:

• Added support for language-aware searches.

Testing:

• Added test framework and tests.

OpenID:

• Added support for Gmail and Google Apps for Domain identifiers. Users can now login with their user@example.com identifier when example.com is powered by Google.

Theme system:

• Removed the Bluemarine, Chameleon and Pushbutton themes. These themes live on as contributed themes
• Added "Bartik" theme as the default user interface theme.
• Added "Seven" theme as the default administration interface theme.
• Added "Stark" theme to make analyzing Drupal's default HTML and CSS easier.

File handling:

• Files are now first class Drupal objects with file_load(), file_save(),
  and file_validate() functions and corresponding hooks.
• Files use PHP stream wrappers to enable support for both public and private files and to support pluggable storage mechanisms and access to remote resources (e.g. S3 storage or Flickr photos).
• Added a field specifically for uploading files, previously provided by
  the contributed module FileField.

Image handling:

• Improved image handling, including better support for add-on image
  libraries.
• Added a field specifically for uploading images, previously provided by the contributed module ImageField.

Better Support for Multisite Installations

Added RDF support

Better support for search engine optimization and web linking

Added ability to add custom fields

• Provides most of the features of the former Content Construction Kit (CCK) module.
• Custom data fields may be attached to nodes, users, comments and taxonomy terms.
• Node bodies and teasers are now fields instead of being a hard-coded property of node objects.
• Fields are translatable.

Installer can be run from the command line

JavaScript changes

• Upgraded the core JavaScript library to jQuery version 1.4.2.
• Upgraded the jQuery Forms library to 2.36.
• Added jQuery UI 1.8, which allows improvements to Drupal's user experience.

Improved node access control system

Task handling

• Improved handling of long-running tasks.

January 7 as Drupal 7 Day!

The release of Drupal 7 was celebrated around the globe on January 7,2011. You can find more information on  drupal7releaseparty.org, how many countries have organized drupal 7 release party.

In Nepal, YIPL is organizing Drupal release party since 2009 for all drupal lovers to meet and share ideas and experiences. They also organized Drupal  7 release party on jan 7,2011. There were around 25 drupal lovers to  to get updated on the major changes done in drupal 7 .  YIPL's team Bibhusan, prashant, bibek shared their experiences, some videos and power point presentation. That was quiet informative for end-users and also for the core developers. I'd like to thank them for organizing such program. Hope you will keep on organizing such events to develop the drupal community in Nepal.

At last, i have some queries for all visitors, have you used drupal before? what about Drupal 7? Do you like it? Is it an improvement? Do you prefer another CMS? Comments are welcome…

Download Drupal 7!