Today Drupal 7 Final was officially released into the wild.
Drupal is a content management system or CMS. Â This basically means that it can be used to get a functional website up and running with a minimal amount of hassle. Â Not only this, but it handles most of the basic administrative functions you would need to perform on a website all from an accessible administration interface. Drupal is written in PHP, and is open source — this essentially means that we are free to use it and free to modify it.
The most notable updates found in Drupal 7 are:
- a simplified install process
- a more streamlined administration interface
- more useful and succinct help
- a more robust module-based structure
If you haven’t tried Drupal yet, now is a great time to give it a try. Â Hundreds of well-known websites currently use Drupal as a CMS, and for good reason. Â The new administration interface is simply beautiful, and with installation profiles you can now choose from a ton of different prefab profiles with the most useful modules for your particular type of website. Â Here is a direct link to the Drupal 7 download page. Â You’ll need a web server running Apache and MySQL, which is relatively simple to set up on a spare Linux box (or VM). Â Official instructions for how to install Drupal can be found on the Drupal website. Â Based on my experience, Drupal is the most full featured, stable, and extensible content management system available today. Â It takes a little bit of time to learn the fundamentals of Drupal, but this is time well spent.