Is Drupal 7.0 better than Drupal 6.0?

Drupal, an open source content management system is one of the most innovative web platforms driving millions of websites and applications. As an open source, Drupal content management system is powered by over half a million people across 200 countries. Its latest version Drupal 7.0 has been creating quite a buzz within the developer community for its slew of improvements over Drupal 6.
Drupal caught up as an open-source solution for its modularity, simplicity and granular control which advanced further by Drupal 6’s usability, security and maintainability improvements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. With these advancements Drupal web development progressed to new heights and currently it powers sites such as Warner Brothers Records, The New York Observer, and Amnesty International etc.
Drupal 6 brought to the table quick and easy set-up, drag and drop administration, improved multilingual and quick translation interface, making web development effortless. The ever increasing popularity of Drupal content management system lead to the launch of Drupal 7.0, touted to be easier and better than its earlier version.
Drupal 7 has taken a major jump leap ahead in the usability aspect of Drupal web development. It is inducted with a new user-friendly interface making it easier for the user to navigate and work on the Drupal site. Menus and panels have been enhanced while formerly indistinct settings can now be found effortlessly with more organized interfaces. It has integrated Content Construction Kit (C.C.K) through which the users can rapidly build content structures for Drupal and RDF module along with structured Semantic Web markup to content.
A series of shadowbox overlays handles the entire administration interface. This is extremely time- saving as the user can administer from anywhere as administrative links are available on each web page, thus eliminating the need of going to administration page every time. More drag and drop administrative tasks have been added along with increased ability to deal with more Meta data.
Image styles and effects are part of Drupal 7 core as huge improvements have been made in this regard. Image styles overlay has made creation of a 300*200 megapixel grescale image a cakewalk. Simple tasks of scaling and cropping can be performed in a breeze without searching for and installing modules like before. With the inclusion of Fields functionality the user no longer needs to download and install CCK or an army of other modules for creating unique content types. Native field handling is included in node content as well as comments and users.
Drupal 6 lacked the ability to carry out private file handling and CSS file aggregation simultaneously. This flaw has been taken care of in Drupal 7 by including an additional field especially for uploading files. The risk factor in storing private or commercial documents in the document root has been eliminated.
Security wise also Drupal 7.0scores high. The log in and password system has been made more secure. Modules can be updated through web and cron.php can only be run by offering the proper key. T
Drupal 7.0 has also taken into account performance enhancement features that enable websites to run faster. Support for add-on images libraries is superior along with improved performance on un-cached pages. Some of the other notable improvements that Drupal 7 offers are-
• Redesigned add content type section
• Renamed “input formats” to “text formats”
• Greater support for integration of WYSIWYG editors.
• Drag and drop positioning for input format listings, language listing and for poll options
• Provides description and human-readable names for users permissions
• In-built, automated cron run feature triggered by site visitors
• Improved time-zone support
• Addition of query builders for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE and SELECT queries
• Gmail and Google Applications support for domain identifiers
• Inclusion of Hook API documentation
• Support for master/slave replication, multiple insert queries, delayed inserts, transactions and other features
• Increased support for Search engine optimization and web linking
• Clearer password strength validation section
• Addition of feed update option as well as test framework
• Three new themes- default user interface and administration interface theme and makes analyzing Drupal default HTML and CSS easier
Drupal 7.0 version has brought better clarity to Drupal content management system by bridging the gaps in Drupal 6. Options that make website pre-builder’s distributions more direct have been cleverly accommodated in Drupal 7 making it right to say that Drupal 7 has all the fixtures to be every developer’s choice.
yogesh sharma
drupal content management system