Drupal 7 Beta Released Today

The Drupal community released the latest version of its Drupal content management system today. This release marks the first beta version of Drupal 7 and a big step forward in regard to Drupal's user experience and approachability. While this isn't a release client and isn't meant for large production sites just yet, it does mean the community is suggesting that new sites be developed using the beta version and encouraging themers and module developers start porting their work over to Drupal 7. In short, if you're a Drupal user (like me) or company that develops sites in Drupal (like PlattForm), and you or your company been waiting patiently to install a stable version of Drupal 7, wait no longer.

New administrative interface, customized and enhanced menus, even better user management, CCK built into core, ability to install modules without FTP, easier upgrade path, rebuilt API's to integrate Drupal even further - there are many new features that will make Drupal even better to use. To put it lightly, the Web Design and Development team, all of our developers, and all of PlattForm is ecstatic about what the realease of Drupal 7 will mean for us and for our clients.

When I attended Dries' keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco in April there were about 80 critical issues left with Drupal 7 and the projected beta release date was sometime in mid-September. We are a week into October now but I think the community is still on track to release a final version of Drupal 7 before the end of the year.

Now that the first beta release is done and more users will be handling the Drupal 7 code you can expect some new issues to arise. As those are added to the issue queue and resolved with subsequent beta versions, eventually the Drupal 7 core will reach release candidate status when there are no more critical issues. If you're eager to start using Drupal 7 (which we have been) there's really no reason to wait. Even if you do not plan on migrating all of your Drupal 6 sites to version 7, it's still important that you test the newest release and provide feedback to the community. This beta release has a lot of visual and performance upgrades that make it a lot of fun to click through, so get out there and take Drupal 7 for a spin! We have, and we will definitely be keeping clients up to date with all of the latest Drupal 7 information as we progress through this great opportunity!