Drupal 7

With the first official release of Drupal 7 imminent, the first books on Drupal 7 start appearing everywhere. Some of them are first editions, others are updates of their Drupal 6 counterpart. One of those updates are "Drupal 7 module development", published on Packt and written by some of the most brilliant contributors to the Drupal project: Matt Butcher, Larry Garfield, John Wilkins, Matt Farina, Ken Rickard and Greg Dunlap. Oh my. I'm also very proud to be one of the technical reviewers of the book.

In the past the bible for Drupal module development has been "Pro Drupal Development". Let's see if this new book is as good, or can be a nice extension to this epic title.

A popular feature request for sites that deal with a lot of content, is to see for each page what other pages are linking back to it. This can be helpful when doing some SEO or cleaning up and rewriting old content.

In Drupal 7 this is easily done. It exists where you wouldn't immediately expect it though: the core search module. Kind of mimicking how search bots like Google's indexer works, Drupal 7's search module now takes the amount of nodes linking back to another node to calculate the score for some result.

Using Drupal's multisite feature, one can use a single codebase for multiple sites. This leaves a smaller footprint and makes your sites more maintainable since you only have to update one bunch of files.

This was already possible in versions prior to Drupal 7 by creating a configuration directory whose name was based on the site's hostname and pathname.

Although easy to setup this was sometimes cumbersome to maintain if you had different copies of your site running on different locations. During the creation of a site, one might typically maintain a development copy, an acceptation copy and a production copy. All these are on different locations. This would lead to creating several versions of the settings directory for one particular site.

In Drupal 7 a solution is provided for this particular problem. A new configuration file is available under the sites folder, called "example.sites.php". Using that file you can set up directory aliases. To see what those are, let's look at a particular example.

One of the smaller improvements in Drupal 7 is the addition of "Configure" and "Permissions" for each module in the modules configuration page. For each module we now have quicklinks pointing to the module's configuration page and the correct section on the "permissions" page.

Since we're all working hard now on making our contributed modules Drupal 7 compatible, I wanted to mention here how to make use of this small feature in your own module.
The "permissions" link is added there automatically by Drupal. For the "Configure" link you need to add one more line to your module's info file.

Yesterday, January 15, 2010 was a big day for Drupal. Our beloved CMS became 9 years old! And boy, did it mature well. To celebrate its birthday, Webchick (Angie Byron), Drupal 7's maintainer released the first alpha version of Drupal 7.

Since a lot of people are wondering what's new in version 7, I decided to gather a list where you can find this out.