Getting Ready for Drupal 7

Drupal 7 is probably one of the most anticipated releases of the Drupal platform ever.  For those in the Drupal community, the promise of improved usability can't come soon enough as we work to position Drupal against other, arguably more user-friendly platforms such as WordPress.  Since its inception, Drupal's biggest drawback has been obstacles with getting basic functionality in place, such as having a WYSIWYG editor for editing.

VMT has been deploying Drupal for a long time.  We launch between 4-6 sites per month on average, and so we've gotten very good at addressing the usability concerns for Drupal.  We've stuck with it as a platform, because aside from that it is, in our opinion, the most scalable, robust, feature-rich platform for deploying websites.  Soon, it seems, we will be rewarded for our tenacity, as the new version not only addresses the usability issue, but also includes performance and security improvements, and brings a number of 3rd-party modules, such as the CCK, into the Drupal core.

WordPress has come a long way, and we do feel that for a blog-centric site it is probably a better fit than Drupal.  However, it still has a ways to go before it can compete from a scalability and flexibility standpoint.  This interesting blog post compares the two platforms, and we're pleased to see we're not the only ones with this viewpoint.

However, it has been frustrating not knowing exactly when Drupal 7 will be released.  Dries and the team have said it will launch when the number of critical bugs outstanding reaches zero.  Fortunately, they've provided us with a website that can help us time the release: http://drupal7releasedate.com/.

According to this site we can expect the official release to be as soon as the end of this month (September 21st), and hopefully before November 1st.  We're keeping our fingers crossed, because we're really looking forward to it.  Of course, as a matter of best practice, we will wait to deploy it for our production clients for several months at least, as the kinks get worked out, but we can't wait nonetheless.