OK I am sort of Old School : I don't jump into new technology bandwagons unless I know where they are headed first. Heck, I don't even get on a bus before I know  where it is going. I am that smart :). Sometimes I think I should still feel good in heavily buckled platform boots, Oxford bags and slim-fit flowered shirt with huge Superfly collars. But you never know, these days walking down the street that way you may easily start a new fashion; and I don't want to be part of that because you never know where it may be headed.

Anyway let's get down to business. When Drupal 7 was in development, I didn't think of giving it a twirl primarily because I was suspicious of this thingy and primarily because you never know how these development type guys think and you don’t want to be prematurely prejudiced. And in any case  none of my projects demanded it yet. But now since the cat (hey, sounds Old School ) was let out of the bag a few days ago , ordinarily reasonable clients suddenly begin to want Drupal 7. So I got myself a download and set off to work on the new craze du jour.

Installation: Now there used to be a problem that most long suffering Drupal developers had with the preceding Drupal 6; and it is really an odd one because it didn't occur in the preceding Drupal 5 (nor in the preceding…) .The installation would usually rap you  if you were fool enough not to have settings.php in the sites/default folder. I am yet to agree to whatever reason why it was necessary for the development guys to have it this way except probably to piss you off. But then when you are getting stuff for free, I guess you should just be happy if it works at all; is my Stoic philosophy. But surprise Drupal 7 installed without even a squeak. It even gave me cleanurl without a fuss, which is really cool.

Administration : My, my; they done gone messed up the damn backend good this time I think. I am left looking all over for stuff that was formerly convenient situated  on one single page view . Anyway they replaced the admittedly ugly Navigation menu and the former back end with a top Toolbar , which okay show you what you want but in a sort of striptease fashion. I will say the Toolbar menu system is intuitive enough though if you are an experienced Drupal user. But if you are new to Drupal my guess that it will just look like an unnecessary hassle.

One good thing that I immediately see as a plus is that functionalities afforded by CCK and Imagefield  modules have been built into the core. Now these were modules which most Drupal installs could almost never do without and you wonder why they weren't ever included in the Drupal 5, 6 core in first case. Maybe those guys forgot. Also the functionalities  for poormanscron has been integrated into core, and the notorious trio of Bluemarine ,Chameleon, Pushbutton themes have been replace by new blood .Thumb up guys !

The whole shebang is ajaxified , and therefore when you select a menu from the overhead Toolbar it handy you your screen in a Thickbox. Not sure yet whether the Thickbox option will also be availed images , login/registration ,captcha etc. ,  but I will possibly get back to you on that soon. Yes, the toolbar is intuitive and gives you selections for Dashboard, Content, Structure,Appearance,People, Configuration,Reports, Help. Simple enough if you understand English. I hope that some module developer hurries up and do one up that adds a drop down for  the "People" selection to show "Spammers" , which are really non-people as far as some of us are  concerned .

Okay, let's go check out the content building process. Hey, they have included a free tagging field for Page and Article (formerly known as Story) content types out of box ; but you will have to create your tagging field for new content types that you introduce including for blogs.

So  let's see what they've done with Taxonomy. Now don't panic; you can still create your vocabularies and terms  as usual but where the heck do you go about associating them with content types ?  Hmmn. Finally found it in the Content Type page view , where I must again give it to those guys is the logical place to place the selection process. Here you can create new fields for your vocabularies. I say logical if you are an old hand , but I guess this could be a real pain  if you are new to Drupal and don’t particularly  want to mess with CCK type stuff.

Extending your install promises to be more joyous too. The beauty of using competing frameworks like Joomla! and WordPress is that add-ons could often be easily installed just by uploading the archive rather than having to manually  FTP the unzipped folders into the site. Now with Drupal 7 you could theoretically do the same with installing your new themes and modules . I say theoretically because install failed for a few modules I tried to upload in this way , and I had to roll up my sleeves and crank up FTP once more. OK call me old School.

It's fun so far. I will keep you informed how it all is going.


- Timi Ogunjobi is Principal Consultant at WEBSESAME (www.websesame.com) and author of Drupal 6 Site Blueprints , Packt Publishing (http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-site-blueprints/book )