Drupal 7 ships on January 5

Drupal 7 is the big new release of the world's most popular full function content management system and it arrives on January 5. In hundreds of countries around the world, Web site owners and developers are staging big parties on January 7 to celebrate the great leap forward.

The Ukraine will host the biggest celebration given that it is also their Christmas day.

Drupal 7 is a big advance on Drupal 6 and Drupal 6 was a big advance on almost everything else out there. There are only a few excuses for not switching to Drupal 7.

• Inertia is always one, there is no point rushing into changing an existing site if the site does what you want.
• The missing date data type in the Drupal 7 fields module is a killer because you have to use an optional add-on module that did not go through the Drupal core testing.
• Drupal 7 automatically converts sites from Drupal 6 to 7 but still has problems with sites that were originally converted from Drupal 5.
• The documentation on building modules in Drupal 7 is several months behind Drupal, limiting your conversion speed if you have lots of your own modules.
• Some useful modules will still be in testing when Drupal 7 arrives. You might want to delay your conversion until all the modules for your site are past beta testing.
• Updating the software is improved and still trails behind Wordpress.

What do you get from the conversion to Drupal 7? Database flexibility is one big advantage. You can switch from MySQL to SQLlite for small sites. You can switch to PostgreSQL for large sites. The code goes through better testing for both reliability and performance. There are more things you can do as administrator without programming.

Accessibility is improved. The content is open to semantic processing due to the inclusion of RDFa. There are a lot of internal improvements that will lead to better code in add-on modules and Web sites when people adjust to the new approach and flexibility.

How to convert from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 contains notes from real conversions using Drupal 7 release candidate 3 and lists the status of some popular modules. For example, the image module works in Drupal 6, is included in Drupal 7 core, but there is not yet a clean automated conversion.

Inertia

Web site developers will use Drupal 7 for new sites first, then for sites that need new features. The other sites will wait.

PHP 5.3

Here is an interesting problem. Drupal 6 is compatible with PHP 5.3 but a lot of add-on modules still require the older PHP 5.2. Drupal 7 uses new features of PHP 5.3. You might need two separate Web hosting accounts to use PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 side by side while converting your Web sites.

Date module

Some people want to convert to Drupal 7 and, at the same time, convert their modules to use the Field feature in Drupal 7 core. Field is missing a date field type. The Date add-on module adds the date type and is still in the early stages of testing. You could convert to Drupal 7 without converting your modules to use Field. You could wait until Date is past beta testing.

Drupal 6 sites converted from Drupal 5

I have several sites converted from Drupal 5 to 6 and some sites converted from Drupal 4 to 5 to 6. I am testing their conversion to Drupal 7 and cleaning out some of the old stuff that breaks the conversion. How to convert from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 mentions some modules you have to delete during the conversion. Some of my sites have old tables that crash into new tables in Drupal 7. The languages table is an example. I have one site where the Local/Languages feature was turned on once in Drupal 5 then turned off. Drupal 6 did not convert the tables to the current Drupal 6 format. Drupal 7 cannot convert the Drupal 5 format. I deleted the tables in the Drupal 6 version of the site.