Yesterday I started playing with Drupal 7 since it hit final, and it's different. I am far too used to Drupal 6, so it's a case of unlearning some things to use Drupal 7. To be honest, I'm still kinda lost at times in the UI but that's just familiarity. I have a few obvious changes to relearn.
CCK is now part of core. If that doesn't mean anything to you, let me explain just what a big deal CCK is. Drupal's 1-2 sucker punch that leaves all other CMS's on the floor is CCK & Views. These used to be two separate modules that almost every site should have, and every Drupal site builder should know.
CCK (Content Construction Kit) allows you to create types of content to your specific needs, adding the fields you need. A blog content type would have a title, post date, body and would accept comments. What happens if you don't need a body field? Or if you need a radio button list, or a url to an image? CCK allows you to build to your hearts content, without it you're reliant on others building content types that kinda match your needs, then work around the limitations to use them.
Views is about allowing you the freedom and flexibility to create pages, rss feeds, blocks etc using the different fields your content is stored in, so you can include post date in the RSS feed, but hide the author name, or have 5 items in the RSS feed, and a sidebar block showing the latest 1 in a grid form.
Where CCK gives the site builder ultimate flexibility in creating the content, Views gives the site builder ultimate flexibility in displaying it. So to repeat an earlier statement, CCK is now part of Drupal core, it comes with Drupal 7 when you install it. This is huge. It's also something I didn't know was coming, I obviously missed that memo. Views is still a separate module which has been ported to Drupal 7, although still in alpha status from what I recall, with a bit of luck Views will be included into core for Druapl 8, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Like the other major modules, both CCK have a flotilla of other modules that build added functionality and flexibility, hooking other modules into Views, or adding extra field types to CCK. Like any major point release it takes time for modules and themes to be ported. So far I've found CCK to be a bit more limited in Drupal 7 because some modules haven't yet been ported. For that reason I'm not sure I can move to Drupal 7 as yet.
The UI has been inspired heavily by the WordPress dashboard idea which is initially confusing simply because Drupal 6 doesn't do that. It is a module, which I assume can easily be disabled, I didn't try it. Stepping back from someone who has engrained Drupal 6 habits, the new UI seems like a very good idea. I like the idea of copying and pasting a link to a tar.gz module or theme and clicking "install", that's so much easier that having to download it, extract it and upload it via FTP. I did find that a few of the modules and themes I tried gave random errors like they weren't ported properly, as Drupal expects X variable to be renamed to Y or commented out for Drupal 7.
All of this will iron itself out as more people use Drupal 7, which in turn will bring the module and theme count up, which in turn will bring more people in. As I said, I only started playing with it so my impressions are just first impressions. I like the idea of the separation of people, appearance, configuration etc with the management menu, it'll just take time to adjust to using it.
I'm kinda lost, I kinda like it, and will be switching my various Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7 at a later date when things have settled down a bit. I have a Drupal 7 install to play with and check module compatibility etc. Overall, a cautious thumbs up. Congrats to the Drupal team.
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Comments
What about security
This mean that your modules/themes directories must be writable by the web server. These directories are used to hold PHP code. This means that a buggy module or core procedure can be exploited to run code on your server much more easily than ever.
That's SCARY!
True, however.....
That's true, however I put faith in the open source development nature of the project, in that people way more knowledgable than me have crawled over the code, as well as the basic of bullet proofing those /sites/default and /sites/all folders. Drupal is not a newly emerged project thrown together by a handful of people, it's very well established and rated as very secure when kept updated.
It also helps to use well established modules that a lot of other users also use. In principle you are right, but Drupal are not the first to do this, and they wouldn't if they weren't satisfied it was secure.
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