Being Brave with Drupal 7 alpha 5

The whole Drupal community has only one thing in mind - When will Drupal 7 be released? Currently D7, as the community calls it, is in its 5th alpha release and there are still around 80 or so bugs marked as critical.

The first beta will not be released until the number of critical bugs are zero. Current pace indicates that we should see the first beta sometime this summer. Since I am as eager as everyone else I can't wait for the real release, but that is longer away as after beta there will be release candidates.

My problem is that I am not skilled enough in PHP development and even less experienced in Drupal development to be able to help out with crushing bugs.

Lately I have been thinking about how I can assist and help all the great people in the community that spends so much time and efforts making it ready. Well, I am good at testing and a not to bad on filing reports and explain my findings. But to be honest, its not too fun to set up a test site just for testing and finding bugs.

How could I make it more fun and be useful for the community at the same time?

Well, I decided to:

Build nutshell.nu on Drupal 7 alpha 5

Yes, that's right. I decided that for my private site Drupal 7 alpha version is ready for production. One of the reasons for this is that since I am building a real site that will be live on the web, then I don't need to search for bugs or other problems, they will find me.

Since I also will have to find solutions to the issues I find, I will put much more effort into testing, finding ways of repeating the problems and write (hopefully) good reports to the real developers so that the problems can be fixed.

Yesterday I installed Drupal 7 on my local dev server and have since been able to create some form of blog site. I have already found a few things I have reported back to the community as well as stumbled on problems already found by others.

Surprisingly Stable

I am not too surprised about how stable this alpha actually is.

For me it is just more evidence about the fantastic work Dries Buytaert (the founder of Drupal) and everyone else in the community has done. Not only to create a fantastic product, but also an infrastructure that aids in the development, such as incorporating Simple Test into drupal.org for automatic testing of modules and patches.

I am not Alone

Even though this website is most likely one of the first to go live using Drupal 7, I am not alone. Dries company Acquia is running its Drupal Gardens on it.

Drupal Gardens is Drupals equivalent to wordpress.com where anyone quickly can build a Drupal based websites without very little development knowledge. It is currently still in beta, but anyone can sign up and create their own website already now.

Their catchphrase is "Design to online in 15 minutes". I haven't tested it myself yet, but have a beta code so as soon as I have 15 minutes over I will give it a try and write a post about it here.

As you can see I am in good company being bold and brave about running a production website on Drupal 7 this early.

Not just Drupal Core

When Drupal 6 was released it took a long time, about a year or so, before it really took off. The main reason for this was that not many modules had been ported to it and therefore it was quite limited regarding what kind of websites could be built on it.

This time around though the community has started its own grand movement to make sure that there are lots of modules available from day one.

This movement is called #D7CX where module put "I pledge that [module name] will have a full Drupal 7 release on the day that Drupal 7 is released." on their project page on drupal.org. Already there are hundreds of modules, and a majority of the most popular ones, that have joined it.

As I wrote in the beginning, I decided to build nutshell.nu on Drupal 7 to be able to test it in a real production environment. That, however, is not just limited to Drupal Core. I also want to help the many module maintainers that also are working hard on porting their projects.

Right now I am only using three modules on this site; Pathauto, External Links and Google Analytics. So far they seem to work pretty good with no real surprises.

There are lots of other modules I want to add to the site, but several of those I wanted to use is not ready yet. Hopefully I will be able to assist in helping the development of them as well. I certainly look forward to play around with them on my local development environment to make sure they wont crash the live site...

The last thing I want to end this post with is that after these two days of playing around and launching a live site on Drupal 7, I definitely feel more part of the community and it is my hope that I can be of some help in bringing a release version out sooner.

Illustration courtesy of getfreeimage.com