Trying Out Drupal 7 Alpha 1

I was checking out Planet.Drupal at the beginning of my work week, as I normally do now, and saw that webchick had announced the release of Drupal 7 Alpha 1 this past Friday, January 15th. There are some great new features available in Drupal 7, and there were quite a few posts hovering around on the planet feed, which prompted me to get a copy of it running on my local as quickly as possible.

It just so happened that the second post I came across was a short but sweet one by Kieran Lal from Acquia. He gave a quick little guide on setting up Drupal 7 Alpha to run on your OSX, Linux, or Windows desktop computer or laptop in a matter of minutes with the Acquia Drupal Stack Installer. I have had this installed previously, but I never really knew how easy it was to launch a new Drupal site with it. It literally took me just 3 or 4 clicks after downloading and unpacking the Drupal 7 Alpha 1 tarball to get it up and running on my Windows machine.

As I said, the install was a snap, so it was time to start adding some stuff. I started with a theme, as I am tired of looking at the old Garland theme at this point. I think Drupal 7 could have come with an updated default theme. It turns out that not many themes are ready for Drupal 7 yet, so I chose Genesis, as it is a great starter theme that is clean and allows you to theme it fairly easily. One feature that stood out immediately as I was looking to add a new theme was the ability to upload a tarball, or enter a URL to a download right inside the UI, instead of having to mess around with unpacking and uploading files. This is a very handy UI upgrade that will definitely help new and beginner Drupalers setup their sites easier.

Enough of making it look pretty, let's add some modules. I started adding some modules just the same way I added my theme. There is another handy upload field to add each module. The only thing better would be to have a textarea that you could drop a bunch of URLs in and do a batch install. That would be a great advanced option perhaps. There are quite a few popular modules that are tagged as being in dev, alpha, or beta versions for Drupal 7 right now. Many of which have added a pledge to their module page tagged #D7CX, which states that their module will have a full Drupal 7 release on the day that Drupal 7 is released. Some modules that you might be looking for but can't find a release for are CCK and Token. Don't worry, as they are both included in Drupal 7 core! CCK has evolved into Fields, which is no longer limited to just content types. Fields can be added to users, taxonomy terms, and other entities within Drupal.

Ok, so maybe not everyone would agree that Windows is great for development work, but I am still weaning myself off of it, and I think it is a good skill to have to be able to develop on any Operating System. I do all of my development for Rapid Waters on OSX, and I have also setup a development and testing environment on Ubuntu, so that rounds out the top 3 anyway. Being a Drupal site builder full-time now, I feel that it is necessary to be able to build a Drupal site in any condition, and that means being able to work in OSX, Windows, and Ubuntu. I have actually run into some instances already where a particular client's website won't load up properly on my OSX dev environment, and had to do the work on my Windows dev machine instead. Whatever gets the job done and gets the job done right is what I need to use in any situation when site building.

Anyway, enough about defending my Windows usage and back to Drupal 7 Alpha 1! This alpha release looks to be very promising for what is to come for a final Drupal 7 release. As long as all the great modules out there hold up to their pledges, things are looking up in the Drupal universe! I look forward to the Drupal 7 launch and what new members it brings to the community with it's UI enhancements and new features. 2010 is looking to be a great year to be a Drupaler.