First Impressions of Drupal 7 alpha 6


published by thomas on Fri, 07/09/2010 - 19:16

As you know Nutshell is my little Drupal 7 experiment, running a live site on it. Its been a fun month and the more I work on it, the more I like how Drupal 7 is turning out.

Earlier today Drupal 7 alpha 6 was released and I was of course eager to test it. Both to see if I could easily update Nutshell to it and to check all the changes since alpha 5.

Not surprisingly, update didn't work. I received several warning messages during update about missing column and indexes in the database and I couldn't view the content on pages properly. This was expected since alpha->alpha updating isn't supported, there is no need for it.

Instead I installed it fresh and also added the contributed modules I use on Nutshell to see if they all work or if changes will break any of them.

Installing Drupal 7 alpha 6

The installation went without problems, it felt as if it was a bit quicker as well. In the release notes it says "Installation will no longer fail when settings.php is not present. Nice usability improvement.", so I first tried installing without renaming it. It didn't work, a copy and rename is still needed.

When the installation is done and you go to your new site you will notice the biggest difference. No more Garland! Bartik has from alpha 6 replaced it as the default theme. Since the header gradient is using a blue colour, the Drupal logo is now grey.

My personal opinion is that the page actually feels quite empty, that something is missing. Also I am not sure, yet, if I like the default serif (Times like) font instead of a the more common sans-serif fonts used on the Internet. Its probably something I have to get used to...

Since I am using Bartik here I have been following the development of it. I know the Bartik team are working hard on improving it, and they are also discussion that it looks a bit empty now. I'm sure that it will look much better by the time Drupal 7 RC1 is ready.

The Overlay has been improved and is quicker. The breadcrumbs in Admin has also been improved, but there are still a few places where they are missing.

Besides Bartik you wont really see many big changes compared to alpha 5. Most of the features seems to be in place now and its simply a matter och getting everything working without bugs.

Currently there are 44 critical issues left in the queue. yeah it has gone up again the last days. The more people that help crushing them, either by providing patches or test it, the quicker we will reach the zero goal and have the release.

Contributed Modules

On Nutshell I use 14 contributed modules and my next test was of course to test if they where working as well. I haven't done a thorough tests yet, only enabled them and replicated their settings from the live site.

I was very happy to see that they so far seems to work just fine. There where a couple of notices about though, but nothing that will break them.

The modules I enabled and configured are:

As mentioned above, I have only replicated the basic configuration from Nutshell and not fully tested any of the above yet. However, so far I haven't got any warnings or other indications they wont work.

Replicating and adding features to Nutshell

Next step for me is to get the content on the live site over to my development server. Then I am planning to both change and add more features to Nutshell over the weekend. If everything goes well I will hopefully be able to upload the new site in the next few days.

There have also been quite a few changes to the Bartik theme compared to the version I am using, so I will have to dig into that as well.

It will be a fun exercise. Hopefully I wont run into any big problems so that i can give you a new fresh taste of what Drupal 7 is all about.

Until then, why don't you give it a spin for yourself?

Tags: 
Drupal
Drupal 7

Comments

#

Adrián (not verified)

Sat, 07/10/2010 - 11:46

Re: First Impressions of Drupal 7 alpha 6

Hi Thomas. The RSS Feed in your Blog is working.

This post is very useful in these critical moments of Drupal. I'm trying to bring my blog from Squarespace.com. I know that it is possible to run a simple blog with Drupal 7, before heading out to the beta. but lacked the guide.

With this post many things change for me, I will begin to prepare to bring my blog to Drupal.

Thanks and Please continue bringing us more of your experience.

#

thomas

Sat, 07/10/2010 - 12:10

Re: First Impressions of Drupal 7 alpha 6

Hi Adrián,

Glad you find my post useful and good luck with your own site.

As mentioned in the post I am working on quite a few changes and feature additions to Nutshell. If all goes well I hope to be able to bring them live tomorrow.

/thomas

Add new comment