Drupal 7 Released: Drupal Release Parties Worldwide

by Jordan Yerman | January 5, 2011 at 08:44 am

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Drupal 7 Goes Live: The Wait is Over

After three years of development, Drupal 7 is now available for free download at drupal.org. Over a thousand developers poured blood, sweat and tears into the latest Drupal version, which promises faster front-end performance, easier admin options, and less agony for those who manage Drupal-based sites.

(NowPublic is a Drupal-based site, and our development team was active in the Drupal 7 build)

Drupal 7: More User-Friendly

Drupal 7 takes a cue from WordPress and acknowledges the existence of users who are not php experts: things like photo and video integration work upon initial installation, and admin panels make more sense.

If you're ready to upgrade your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7, read the upgrade instructions carefully before proceeding. For the love of all that you consider holy, back everything up (database and the site itself), and run the upgrade in a development/sandbox environment if at all possible. Note that the contributed modules you're currently using will not work on D7, so you'll have to look for updated versions. Having said that, you'll find that Drupal 7 core has adopted many features once left to contributed modules.

If you're moving from an earlier version (Drupal 5 or earlier), you must first upgrade to Drupal 6, and then hop up to 7. Sorry.

Popular sites that run on Drupal include: