Last week, I was able to attend an all-day Drupal training put together by Drupal Therapy. While it (the training) covered everything from installing modules to creating content, it was geared toward showcasing some of the changes coming with the pending release of Drupal 7.

I’ve been working with Drupal websites since the days of Drupal version 4.7. In those three or four years, Drupal has come a long way to being more user-friendly. Despite its advancements in versions 5 and 6, the biggest criticism against Drupal has always been its poor usability. Drupal was rightly criticized as being a system designed by and for developers and not for your average non-technical staff person wanting to easily update their website. The good news is Drupal 7 will make a huge step forward in quashing those criticisms. The new version of Drupal is fast, easy to use, and much more intuitive that it has ever been.

The biggest advancement by far is in site administration. Let’s face it, Drupal is best used for big sites with cool features, but the learning curve for an organization’s website administrator to learn all the nuances of where things are configured, how to find them - let alone understanding what a nodequeue is - has always been very steep. Drupal 7 could potentially cut that learning time in half. Now, terminology is accessible to normal people - “user management” is now called “People” - people, after all, use websites. (David Pogue of the New York Times joked that the only two industries that refer to their customers as “users” are technology and illegal drugs). Configuring key features no longer takes 3-4 clicks but are now reachable right on the page where you need to make the change. This ability for direct, contextual management is a huge advancement.

Other important advancements (for a comprehensive list, see here):

• Every user (there I go again) has a customizable dashboard. Imagine you’re a content editor and you want to see a dashboard of content that needs moderation and a list of recent comments - that’s all now built-in.
• Key features that used to be only available as add-ons are now a part of Drupal core. The biggest example of this is the feature to create customized content types. The Content Construction Kit module – the add-on that provided this functionality – has been re-engineered and now exists as the Fields feature in Drupal 7 core.
• Better security. In the old days of Drupal, there was always one account that had universal power. Now, someone has to be explicitly granted the administrator role to have high-level access to the site. This eliminates the possibility of someone who no longer works at your organization still being able to access the site and potentially do damage.
• Installing modules is now very easy, can be done from within the site, and no longer requires someone to access the site’s server. While this may make some developers shudder in fear, I believe it is an important advancement in putting more power in the hands of administrators.
• While more awesome modules are sure to follow, the most exciting one currently on the horizon is the new Media module. While Drupal has had a number of powerful image and multimedia solutions, the Media module addresses the asset management problem from the ground up, providing an API for developers to build tools to easily upload images, videos, or even some other external data source, all accessed via an easy-to-use interface.
• Drupal 7 ships with a host of new themes, but not just any themes: Drupal now comes out of the box with first-rate administrative themes. These are welcome additions to Drupal shops across the world because it allows a shared starting point for development, training, and support.

With all these great advancements, there are still some areas that the Drupal community could have improved but didn’t. A few examples include:

• There is still no text editor (aka WYSIWYG) installed and enabled by default. The average content editor cannot be expected to know HTML in order to add content to their site, and the process to install a text editor is complex and cumbersome. My hope is that one day Drupalistas will give in and acknowledge how important it is to ship Drupal with an editor.
• As noted above, a lot of terminology became easier to understand, but many examples of confusing jargon still exist. For example, “weights” for menu items and “input formats” for content areas are still alien terms to the average user.

All of us at EchoDitto are very excited about Drupal 7. We are probably 3-4 months away from a solid release but we are already starting to talk to our clients about upgrading when the time is right. Drupal 7 will be a tremendously powerful tool for our clients’ work and campaigns. We can’t wait!