Drupal 7 alpha 6 Released - Overview of What is New

The Drupal 7 release date is getting closer. Last night (CET) Angie "webchick" Byron released Drupal 7 alpha 6 to the world. In this post I will give you a quick overview of what has changed since alpha 5.

Bets where on that it would be a beta this time, but we will have to wait a bit more for that. That it is a new alpha means that the upgrade path is not there just yet.

What is new in this release then?

Bartik in Core as the New Default Theme

The biggest news is that the beautiful Bartik theme not only made it to core, it is now also the default theme used when installing it. Drupal 7 will still ship with Garland, but no longer as the default theme.

I have used Bartik here on Nutshell and it is one of the best themes I have used so far. Its very easy to use as well as customise to your own needs. It truly deserves to both be in core and be the new default theme.

Big congratulations to Jen Simmons and everyone one else that helped getting Bartik into core.

Other Changes from Alpha 5.

• Numerous fixes to the upgrade path, including basic tests. Getting very close! :)
• Numerous important security fixes.
• Numerous accessibility improvements.
• Setting up Private files is now optional, rather than required.
• Registry made more fool-proof and robust.
• Redesign of Field UI "Manage Display" screen, to reflect multiple view modes. Field UI screens are now also extensible from contrib.
• Re-implementation of Overlay without jQuery UI, to address numerous critical issues.
• User creation setting now defaults to "Visitors, with admin approval" for security.
• Installation will no longer fail when settings.php is not present. Nice usability improvement.
• Required modules are once again shown on the modules page.
• Many improvements to input formats and filters.
• Table prefixes are now per-database connection, rather than global.

From a usability point I am very eager to test the improvements to the Overlay. It was good in alpha 5, but a little bulky and slow to work with. A couple of weeks ago Angie tweeted that it will be something like 800% faster in this release, that would be a very welcomed speedup.

Download Drupal 7 Alpha 6 and give it a spin. If you find any issues or quirks, please feed it back to the issue queue.

Update: You still need to rename the default.settings.php to settings.php manually.

Nutshell Updating to Alpha 6

Over the weekend I will play with the new alpha on my local development environment. Hopefully updating nutshell to it will not be a big problem. However, since it is still alpha I am pretty sure I will run into some problems, both with core and some of the contributed modules I use. Hopefully they will be easy to fix.

Stay tuned for a post about my findings.