More Drupal 7 Alpha 6 Experimenting

In my last post about my first impressions of Drupal 7 alpha 6 I gave you an idea of how good it works and what contributed modules seems to work with it.

Now I have had a bit more time to play with it, including replicating more of the functionality from Nutshell to my local development environment. So far the only module, from the list in that post, that doesn't fully work is Backup and Migrate. It does backup just fine, but when you try and restore you get a message that it doesn't accept .mysql or .mysql.gz files. Thus the restore will not be performed. This is most likely due to a change in the Drupal 7 core and I have reported it to the issue queue. Hopefully it will be sorted soon.

Sure, there are still quirks in many places, but nothing that actually breaks functionality. Its only minor issues that can be ignored.

In the post I also wrote that I was hoping to be able to update the live Nutshell website to alpha 6 over the weekend. Unfortunately that wont happen, mainly due to time.

More Modules Tested

Another reason is that I want to redo a few things, as well as introduce some new features at the same time. These new features will require me to install a few more contributed modules, and I have spent yesterday and today trying them out.

These new modules will be:

• Insert - To be able to easily insert images into the content using the Image Styles. (See note below list)
• Image Resize Filter - To be able to scale inserted images, when needed, and automatically create a cached image of the viewed size.
• Global Redirect - Its an important module for helping out with clean URLs and SEO among other things.
• Path redirect - I am going to redesign the taxonomy structure I use and this module helps making sure the old paths will redirect to the new URL for many of the terms.
• Views - Now when Nutshell is starting to get some content it is time to give you a much better frontpage, taxonomy term pages and other stuff so you want to come back more often. What other module than Views will help me do that?
• Advanced help - Mainly because it is a helper module for Views, but it does add other things as well making it easier to develop Drupal websites.

Note about Insert: Make sure you apply this patch before you enable the module, otherwise it wont work. Then when you enable insert for an image field you will get a warning both when you next edit the image field and when viewing pages. The module still seems to work OK though. The images are inserted properly as well as cached versions of the images are generated for the image style you select for them. I have reported this issue to the queue.

The rest of the above modules seems to work just fine for Drupal 7. There are some minor glitches with certain features in them, but those are easy to avoid until they are fixed. For the way I am going to use them now, they will do the job I ask of them.

I am quite excited about the new features I am working on. Especially since I will start to tap into some of the new features in Drupal 7.

Hopefully it will be giving you a better idea of what it has to offer.