Drupal 7 Foundation Almost there for Nutshell

Okay, now we talking. Have installed a few more Drupal 7 modules and the site is now starting to get in shape. This time though I took a simple shortcut and had a look at the modules used on Drupal Gardens to save me some time testing. After all, if they work there, then its a very good chance they will work on my site as well.

New additions:

• AddThis Button - Just so you can share my wonderful posts easier. Unfortunately it isn't possible to control for which content types it should be visible on, like for Drupal 6, but I'm sure they will sort that out soon.
• Comment Notify - Dries said last year he wanted this one in Core, but for some reason it didn't make it. Its a must for any site offering comments.
• Flexible Blogs - This module doesn't do much, but it make the blog module more sensible as well as making it easier to transition from a singe user/site blog (like this site) to a multiuser blog site later on. It lets you control the blog link under posts to no link, link to author or site wide blog.
• Follow - This is another example of a small focused, but oh so nice module to have. You can configure site wide syndication and follow links as well as let users have their personal links on their profile pages. Only quirk I found is that the icon for the RSS feed is smaller than the others, it should really have the same size.
• WYSIWYG -The majority of Drupalistas would have liked it if Core came with a standard rich text editor. Unfortunately it didn't happen, hopefully it will for Drupal 8. Even though there isn't many visible differences between the Drupal 6 and 7 version of this module, configuring and managing Text formats (as they now are called) is much much quicker and better with the new UI Core comes with. Now its all on one page instead of several tabs that you had to constantly switch between before. Like it very much.

So far I am really enjoying the experience of building a live site with Drupal 7. Honestly, I had expected a lot more problems, it is an alpha version after all, but it has been very smoothly and only inspired me to do more.

I have found a few issues both in core and in the modules I use. Some where already reported, while I submitted tickets for those who weren't. The maintainers have been very quick to respond to most of the issues I have found. Thus my only conclusion is that everyone is working very hard to get their stuff ready for D7-Day.

The new Administration UI

I know there is a 7.x dev version of Administration Menu but I decided not to try it since I wanted to force myself to use the new admin UI.

Doing so I have discovered a lot of all the improvements that I am sure I otherwise would have missed using the shortcuts it offers.

Everything is much cleaner and intuitive now. Its easy to add shortcuts for your own special needs or even role based. The new overlay is fantastic and working with the site is so much quicker.

I feel that I have only started to tap into the new administration UI and as I get used to it more it will be even more productive to work with. At some point though I will most likely install Administration Menu as, guessing, it will save a few clicks and page loads to speed things up even more.

Next in Line

I'm sure you have noticed that I haven't added many pretty pictures in my posts yet. Yes, I know Drupal 7 comes with ImageCache and a lot of stuff to easily add images. I deliberately decided to wait a little with using that. First I wanted to get a good foundation as well as a better feel for it. After all, Drupal 7 is a very big upgrade, the core archive is about twice the size of Drupal 6 so there is a lot of new things to learn and old "habits" to change.

Now though I feel I have the basics covered and can move on to make it more appealing.

My plan for the next few days:

• Evaluate the Bartik theme to see how far it has come and hopefully use that instead of Garland.
• Dig into the image support in Drupal 7, including modifying the content types to suite my needs.

I have also looked at the new field support and have a few ideas I want to test, especially this has to do with Taxonomy. I have a feeling that it will be possible to use more or less only Core features to do what I want, that in Drupal 6 would have required several contributed modules and still not get it the same result. Really looking forward to test that idea.

Stay tuned for new updates.