Will Drupal 7 fulfill Dries' wishes?


By tgeller - Posted on 02 June 2010

In preparing a "Drupal 7: New Features" video series for lynda.com, I decided to go waaaay back to when we were just starting to plan Drupal 7. Lo and behold, Dries wrote a blog post in February 2008, a few weeks before Drupal 6 was released, with a list of features he wanted to see in Drupal 7.

Now we're pretty darn close to Drupal 7's release. How're we doing? I think we can break down his 11 points into three categories: Done, Sort Of Done, and Not Done. (Special thanks to chx (Károly Négyesi) for providing some details via IRC.)

Done

  • Usability improvements comprise the most-visible changes. The intense work of many people resulted in great advances, with Acquia's funding of Mark Boulton Design providing strong direction.
  • Custom content types in core: Win! Most of Content Construction Kit (CCK) is now part of Drupal 7, although that popular module will continue to be available for some functions that didn't get into core.
  • Automatic upgrade functionality: This is a HUGE win, making Drupal more accessible to people without the knowledge or access to make direct changes on their web server.
  • Better internal APIs: I'm not a qualified to talk about these from first-hand knowledge, but chx and Heine gave two convincing examples: the new database layer, which allows Drupal to connect to any database, with the appropriate driver; and stream wrappers, which let Drupal treat remote files as though they're local.

Sort Of Done

  • Better media handling: Media handling in Drupal 6 stank, and there's no denying that it's a lot better in Drupal 7. Before, you had to add several contributed modules -- CCK, ImageField, ImageAPI, FileField, and ImageCache -- to do the most mundane tasks. Those have all been incorporated into Drupal 7 to some extent, with intelligent defaults. Further, the built-in Article content type includes space for a single graphic. However, it's a far cry from the sort of media handling that would be possible with a true WYSIWYG editor that allows you to place as much media as you want, wherever you want it.
  • Better external APIs (import/export, web services): This is another area that I'm unqualified to talk about directly. chx says this "deserves a tick, too" because of such matters as delivery callback. But I haven't heard much else about this point, and welcome clarifications.
  • Better tools to structure/organize content show up in the improved user interface. For example, clicking "Content" in the toolbar takes you straight to a list of content on your site, whereas that took at least two clicks in Drupal 6. Other changes, such as fields in core, affect content management. But there's nothing really groundbreaking here.
  • Better performance: As Dries stated at DrupalCon San Francisco (and was reported elsewhere), Drupal 7 is actually slower than Drupal 6. On the other hand, changes to caching and storage make it far more scalable, so perhaps for large sites performance is "better".

Not Done

  • WYSIWYG editor: Not there, damn it. A great loss for newbies. Use the WYSIWYG module and a compatible client-side editor instead.
  • ???

    • Improved node access system. I haven't seen any evidence of this. Could anyone comment?
    Tags


    Basic Views like module: Not in core. I'm sure it'll be in Acquia Drupal, and a SimpleViews-like module will be in Drupal Gardens.

    There will be a views-like api, called listing-api, hopefully.

    Node access is an API thing. Sort of done. It's better but still not great.

    For SQL queries, the new DB layer provides a query builder. It's not Views, but it's still better than D6 in that regard.

    There is also active work on a Field-only query builder that is more akin to a Document DB interface than Views, but if it makes it in it should still be huge: http://drupal.org/node/780154

    The node access system actually had a large number of updates. There was a very productive BoF 2 years ago in Szeged that generated a punch list of things to fix, all of which have since happened: http://groups.drupal.org/node/14419 It's actually a vast improvement, although there are still things I'd like to be able to improve in D8 if possible.

    The delivery callback is a small first step toward Drupal turning from an HTML page generator into a web services server that treats an HTML page as just another ReST response. That's as much as got done in D7 core, but the Services module should be able to leverage it in contrib to clean up a lot of code. There's also a Services sprint happening as I write this to use ideas coming out of the Butler group, which in turn is targeted as D7 contrib and, hopefully, early Drupal 8.

    I consider not having a WYSIWYG editor built into core to be a good thing, frankly. They're easier to support now thanks to changes to core, but keep that crappy crap out of my lean-and-mean Drupal core! (At least until a non-sucky one gets invented. As long as all WYSIWYGs suck, they should remain the purview of distributions.)

    Interesting post. I think you're mostly right with your analysis.

    - "WYSIWYG editor": we made a lot of improvements to Drupal 7's filter/text format system, some of which will make it easier to integrate WYSIWYG editors consistently across Drupal. We also explored inline editing of content but didn't get beyond contextual links on blocks (i.e. the cog when you hover over a block or node). Not WYSIWYG in the strict sense, but still a step in the right direction in my opinion.

    - Improved node access system. We made quite a few improvements to Drupal's node access subsystem; tagging/filtering queries, explicit denies, alter functions for node access, node access on unpublished nodes, etc. I haven't watched it yet but http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/node-access-drupal-7 might have the details. Either way, we committed a series of small but important API improvements. Drupal core does not have a UI for node access so the contributed modules, not core, will take advantage of these improvements.

    - Views. I haven't checked with merlinofchaos yet, but I think Drupal 7 could simplify Views. I agree that this one should stay in the 'not done' bucket though.

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