andrew.eatherington : websitemaker

On January 7th 2011 Drupal celebrated the release of version 7 of it's content management system framework, the culmination of some hard work from the Drupal community.

Drupal 7 went through an extensive user experience overhaul which started at the beginning of 2009 and known as the Drupal 7 User Experience Project or D7UX. The d7ux.org site documented the process and it's outcomes. The key principles of the D7UX project:

1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable.
2. Design for the 80%
3. Privilege the Content Creator
4. Make the default settings smart

With the framework itself, the actual code that sits behind the user interface, over 950 people were credited as a contributors to Drupal 7 in the commit messages (when code is uploaded to the project repository). But credit must also go to the many thousands who reviewed, tested and documented it.

Here are some of the features that have been improved in D7:

• Vastly improved administrative user interface thanks to the D7UX movement
• Flexible content and custom fields
• Better visual presentation and theming with Render API
• Accessibility is greatly improved
• Image support is now included
• Automated code testing
• Improved database support
• Better distribution support
• Support for the Semantic Web through RDFa markup

Drupal wouldn't be Drupal without the contributed modules that extend the core functionality of the CMS and over 850 Drupal 7 contributed modules met their #d7cx pledges to upgrade their contributed modules to be compatible with this release.

Congratulations to everyone involved! More information about Drupal 7 can be found at Drupal.org.