Drupal 7 brings to the table a huge improvement in the user experience front, while still using the infamous garland theme as it's default theme. The release date for Drupal 7 is not set in stone since it's still in the Alpha 2 stage, there are about 143 critical bugs right now that need to be brought to zero before the project can move to the beta stage, critical bugs are the kind that break drupal core in really tragic ways. Dries (The creator of Drupal) is hoping to have a beta release by the second quarter of 2010. I'll show you a preview of the current D7 Alpha 2 release.
Installation
The installer uses the new d7 administration theme Seven. The installation process is pretty much the same except for a few options on the Configure Site stage.
Toolbar and Overlay Modules
The first and most significant addition to Drupal core is the Toolbar module, It uses the same top bar approach as the Administration Menu module. It provides a very easy to use toolbar with all the important areas only 1 click away. This is a huge improvement in user experience because a great majority of new Drupal users become frustrated at the lack of intuation the d5 and d6 interfaces have offered;
Everyone's favorite moment while mentoring a new drupal user:
"Yes you go to /admin, yes /admin on the address bar. [then figure out what all these abstract terms mean] yeah... Blocks, It's content that goes in regions, what are regions you say?"
Now that ficticious quote might make someone think that blocks are gone but they are not, in fact a lot of the same features are present. The categories on /admin are much more specific and a lot of items have been recategorized, for example content types is in structure now, not under content.
The toolbar and overlay modules working together to create a more "ajaxified" experience. Links opened from the toolbar open in an overlay, the + next to the overlay title lets you add that page to the shortcut bar (the gray bar on the toolbar) to maximize efficiency.
New Core Modules
Testing - Provides a framework for unit and functional testing.
Shortcut - Allows users to manage customizable lists of shortcut links.
RDF - Enriches your content with metadata to let other applications (e.g. search engines, aggregators) better understand its relationships and attributes.
Image - Provides image manipulation tools.
File - Defines a file field type.
Fuild UI - User Interface for the Field API.
Dashboard - Provides a dashboard page in the administrative interface for organizing administrative tasks and tracking information within your site
Contextual Links - Provides contextual links to perform actions related to elements on a page.
Have you tried out Drupal 7 yet?
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