Drupal 5 Retires, Drupal 7 is Out and On the Loose

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been trying out Drupal 7 [4] on my personal site. Drupal 5 has been officially retired [5], so I thought I’d do an experiment and move my personal blog from WordPress to Drupal 7. And so far, I’m very pleased. But it took a while to get my site built, mostly because some of the modules I needed weren’t working when I started building about a month ago. There’s so much activity that modules are being updated hourly. One key module I needed was the WordPress Migrate [6] module. It didn’t work two weeks ago, and it didn’t work a few days ago, until there was a new beta release in the afternoon. Then it worked (though I needed some help; I am lucky enough to live with a MySQL guru).

First impressions can be summed up this way: I would never in a million years have recommended Drupal 6 as a viable platform for a small blog or simple website, for example. Because with great power comes great complexity--that’s one downside of Drupal. I really like WordPress, and it’s always been my go-to for small sites. But honestly, I can see using Drupal 7 for a client’s site as small as mine, if his or her org didn’t need to rely heavily on any modules that are still in beta.

I started out trying the Omega [7] theme, but it was overkill for my little site, so I went with Sky [8]. I hope Sky, and more similarly simple themes like it, continue to show up and evolve, because they help make building smaller sites in Drupal 7 easier.

Here are some quick pros and cons of my Drupal 7 experience so far.

Pros

• Module and theme install via the UI! In ye olden days, you had to download modules and install ‘em by hand, via FTP. Then, awesome command line utility Drush [9] showed up, and it is amazing, powerful, and fast... but this? This is insanely easy. (Until something goes wrong, of course. <Drupal wink>)
• On the modules page, there are links to the permissions and configure pages for each module. So you don’t have to enable a module, and then go hunting for its admin pages. Many click-hours will be saved.
• Some useful modules, including things like Content Construction Kit (CCK) for creating custom fields, are now integrated into core.
• For developers, the admin menu that comes with D7 has a flush caches link in the upper left corner. Awse!

 
Cons

• Some of the new admin area organization confuses me. The menu categories “Configuration” and “Structure” seem a bit arbitrary.  Like, to set up the sitewide contact form, I have to click on “Structure.” It seems that could go in “Configuration”. That might make more sense to me. I know the admin user interface was developed via committee [10]. I appreciate the effort, but I feel like it might need some more work.
• The default admin menu pops up as an “overlay” over your content. I wanted my old simpler surf-to-it admin experience, so I disabled the overlay on the modules page. Much better.
• Like I mentioned earlier, D7 modules are still in flux. So you might want or need something only to find that it’s really not ready. One of the most needed modules that isn’t completely stable yet (still in alpha at the time of this post) is Views [11]. Views! Yeah, that’s gonna keep me from being able to move a lot of orgs into D7.

I foresee that most new sites this year will likely still be built in Drupal 6. But I do think Drupal 7 is getting friendlier. That’s pretty exciting.