Modern CMS features with Drupal 7.0

April 30th, 2010 · No Comments

Drupal Web Hosting As Drupal host evolved since its initial release, the latest 7.0 release offers a wide variety of features and options optimized for distribution. Beginning in 2008, the Drupal core development team analyzed the needs of the development community based upon the version 6 distribution.

The intelligence gathering allowed them to create a prioritized checklist of requirements for version 7, which then informed the larger development roadmap over time. Users requested improved custom media fields, faster performance, easier in-line content editing and a more robust MVC framework. Additionally, developers sought improved APIS, easier upgrades to the latest builds and a more user friendly view display.

On the back end, the team developed a new administrator area highlighting system, content, settings and appearance management. Now developers as well as editors could access a variety of features with just a single click.

While managing content is easier, the site also has a more dedicated permissions field entry system so you can build out pay walls for premium content, members’ only areas as well as a variety of features driven by the improved e-Commerce system. In fact, version 7 aims to provide a content, commercial and social module system to compete with any standalone product on the market today. For developers, the new features in Drupal provide the best of modern content management platforms with a complete MVC core model for developing on LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP.)

Improvements in Drupal 7 for Developers

While the front and admin end of the new version are much improved for end users, developers will find a variety of important updates as well. One of the most important code updates is improved testing for new settings and modules, so you can debug updates before they go live.

Rather than working with an independent testing package you can integrate the full MVC development model into Drupal natively, speeding up development time and providing even more options for developers. While the improved testing is important, an even more crucial element with the new version of Drupal is its improved support for large scale databases.

Drupal has full support for large SQL sites, as well as the ability to create an efficient (scaled) system with master/slave objects. When it comes to loading multiple layers of data efficiently in social or highly customized sites, Drupal can now handle the ability to scale to thousands of users (or pieces of content.) At the same time, the version now supports external PP wrappers so you can easily integrate storage from Amazon or another source to ease the data transfer load on your own server.

The software has greatly matured over the past few years, and appears ready for full scale enterprise distribution. With the latest release of Drupal, developers of all types can now have a full scale CMS ready to layer on a PHP application. Saving time and resources in development with Drupal can make it substantially easier to build, launch and deploy professional PHP apps. With Drupal 7, developers finally have a CMS that is flexible enough for nearly any project.