14 DAY TRIAL // As expected Drupal 7 has been launched and is available for download after some three years in development. Drupal 7 comes with plenty of updates and new features and promises to be easier to manage thanks to a large number of user experience enhancements. There are plenty of improvements under the hood as well, making it a worthwhile update.
"Drupal's phenomenal growth arose from Drupal 6; Drupal 7 represents a major leap forward in terms of usability, performance and capability," Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, said.
"Drupal 7 sports an improved new user interface, accessibility improvements, better image handling capabilities, support for rich content metadata, security features, scalability and database interoperability enhancements, a suite of 30,000 automated tests to ensure stability, and more," Angie Byron, the Drupal 7 core maintainer, explained.
"In short: it's a tremendous leap forward for the project and for website builders everywhere, we are thrilled to formally release Drupal 7 to the world," she added.
One of the common complaints with Drupal 6 and previous releases was that its management interface proved difficult for new users and could be a lot friendlier, especially for those with no coding experience.
The biggest focus during Drupal 7 development has been on the user experience and accessibility. Content creators and managers especially should appreciate the new capabilities.
Websites admins may find their lives easier with the added flexibility in Drupal 7 which supports a number of databases out of the box, SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL. There are also modules available which add support for MS SQL Server, Oracle and others.
One of the best things about Drupal is its extensibility and Drupal 7 is no different as there are already over 800 modules available for the latest version. Drupal 7 is the work of over 1,000 contributors and, after three years of development the stable version is now available for download.
Drupal 7.0 is available for download here.