Drupal 7 - what the fuzz

This weekend I decided to move mandatory work aside and as a fun project move workaround.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. I was very enthusiastic about all the shiny news things that I remembered from former discussions and announcements. Finally all the essential modules like Views and Panels would be built-in. No more installing FCKeditor with IMCE that takes one day until it stops bitching about permissions and finally allows image uploads.

After the upgrade everything looked shiny and tidied up. Actually I barely saw any new features. I was left with a textfield instead of a WYSIWYG editor. And there were no Views or Panels built in. The administration toolbar on top was far from being as helpful as the Administration Menu module everyone is using. So except for a tidied up administration interface not much had changed. After upgrading to Drupal 7 it rather feels like a new minor version. I can't speak for what happened under the hood.

So I bit the bullet and installed all that missing modules again - at least I could add them directly from within Drupal and don't need the console any more. But as usual CKEditor needs IMCE and some manual downloading and configuration. Seriously - who is using a CMS without a WYSIWYG editor.

Next module on my list was Views. Surprise: it's not even stable for Drupal 7 and the alpha version expectedly has a number of bugs. So anyone using Views in production should rather stay on Drupal 6? There was so much fuss about"I pledge to have Date released on the day that Drupal 7 is released" on most modules but the most important modules aren't yet there.

The main page of workaround.org uses the Panel module. This module, too, did not have a stable release for Drupal 7. And the administration interface was even buggier than that of Views. At first I thought that they just don't properly support Google Chrome but even with Firefox/Iceweasel it didn't look better. So no panels.

Next I played with installing and uninstalling modules. Installing from the administration screen is nifty and I missed it all the time. But what about uninstalling. I have to manually untangle the web of dependencies reloading the page several times until the module is disabled. Then I uninstall the module. But it's still there - right on my harddisk. Installing the module again is impossible because Drupal complains it's already there. I have to remove it from disk manually. Meh.

Don't get me wrong. I still like Drupal. And Views are a great invention. But I believe that Drupal 7 is little more than a few visible improvements along with a huge marketing campaign. Even with lower expectations I would recommend to wait another half a year so that at least Views get stable. Bummer.

3 Comments

Drupal 7 has a lot of changes.

There are a lot of changes under the hood but a lot of what where contrib modules are now part of the core product.  So although Views isn't in most of CCK is.  Yea Drupal really needs a full screen editor and there are a lot of things that couldn't have been merged into core but there is still a lot of stuff you no longer need to download and install.

Thanks

Robert

WYSIWYG

Seriously - who is using a CMS without a WYSIWYG editor.

I am one who doesn't use a WYSIWYG editor... While yes, I like them, I absolutely hate the underlying code that is completely manged on the back end. Until Drupal comes with a built in WYSIWYG editor that is clean and efficient, I'll continue to mark my code up by hand.

Just my $0.02