Drupal 7 What’s new, what can it do, and should you use it?

Overview

Why Drupal?

WHY NOT?

Why Drupal

•  Drupal community consists of roughly 750,000 people

•  There are nearly 14,000 user contributed modules available

•  One of the largest open source projects

•  Core updates released about every 2 - 3 months

•  New stable releases of core are scheduled for the last Wednesday of each month (if applicable)

Benefits of Using Drupal •  No need for working knowledge of SQL thanks to Views

module.

•  Easliy configurable blocks of content that can be available in any number of configurations on your page.

•  Quick access to roles and permissions on a granular level

•  Ease of importing data from other sites with help of Feeds module

•  Built-in jQuery library with easy to set up features, i.e. dropdowns, subnavigation, and Ajax in Views.

•  Simple to use user interface for content of site and site-wide functionality

What Drupal is good for:

•  Granular permissions?

•  Retrieve dynamic data without any PHP/MySQL code

•  Ease of creating content types

•  Complex relationships between data

Would I ever use Drupal 6?

•  Only if absolutely necessary

•  New feature development has been frozen for 6

•  Drupal 8 is around the corner

What's New in 7 Already!?

•  Much improved Usability

Typical Drupal 6 Admin Themes

New Administrative Interface

40+ Popular Modules moved to Core

CCK - the definitive module for creating unique content types

Image Handling - Image Field, ImageCache, Image API

Increased Security - Flood Control, Login Security, Secure Password Hashes (no more MD5), CRON

Should I Upgrade from 6 to 7?

Sure!

System requirements – six takes 30-40 megs of ram, seven takes 40-64mb

D7 requires PHP 5.2.5 or higher (6 required 4.4.0+)

These modules require special migration:

CCK, Content Taxonomy, Date Timezone, Field taxonomy, FileField/ImageField, Image, Taxonomy Delegate, Taxonomy Intro, Term Fields

Any Questions?