Welcome Drupal 7

On January 5, 2011, Drupal 7 was released to the general public. Its creation was part of a three year process by the Drupal community, and its release is a celebration by the community of a platform that keeps getting stronger, more popular, and more supported.

Drupal has come a long way. My exposure to Drupal started around Drupal 5, where things were tough to override, modules were somewhat limited, and you still needed two key modules to get things done. namely the modules CCK (Content Construction Kit) and Views.

Drupal 7 somewhat limits those key modules from two to one, with CCK being integrated for the most part into Drupal Core. This becomes important. CCK primary purpose was to create new content types from what currently exists in Drupal Core and add fields to these content types. CCK's integration means that this is built in and module developers can always rely on fields being in Drupal as they build this module.

To me, this is the first step towards better Media integration. The Media module is exclusive to Drupal 7 and promises to make media handling much easier in Drupal, something that it is lacking with currently and losing badly to Wordpress. I think this is a great start towards making Drupal in its core, better.

Some say that Views should be a part of core as well, I disagree. Views is served better by being a third party module with maintainers serving exclusively towards making it a better module. It already blows every other module out of the water, and integrating it into core, sorry to say would hurt Views. Its better being an independent entity that to be integrated into core and being updated with the other modules.

Drupal 7 brings a more user friendly interface, more features, and a lot of potential, and with a growing community looking towards its success, I see a great leap forward in Drupal.