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It’s been a while since i heard rumors about upcomming release of Drupal – Drupal 7. Lately i decided to make some research about this new version, and surprisingly i was pleased from what i saw. It looks like they did lot of work on Drupal for next release. We check some of them now.

First of all its eyecandy new GUI, which is really tasty, i hope all of you will enjoy the new admin theme with toolbar and cool overlay. I just hope Drupal developers know what they are doing, and Drupal will not slow down on the client (browser) side because of lot of javascript animations and stuff. But it looks pretty light so far.

Also Drupal 7 will bring lot of top modules into the core, like: cck, views, pathauto, and enhanced image support, or administration Toolbar (formerly known as admin menu, which is one of most popular modules at all).

You can setup and try Drupal 7 yourself by visiting Drupal 7.x-dev page, and download Drupal 7 development package. Using this package in production Environment is strongly not recommended. For those who don’t wanna install, but just try, i found Drupal 7 sandbox, where you can play, but play nice…

Here is set of installation screenshots which you can use as installation guide. Anyway installation is pretty user friendly. The requirements for installation changed a bit, you have to create directories: sites/default/files sites/default/private/files sites/default/private/temp , then copy sites/default/default.settings.php to sites/default/settings.php and set all of them to be writable by web server.

Another important thing is Drupal 7 will require PHP 5.2+ only, according this post. This will bring better performance and better funcionality based on sqlite, date, simlexml and other php 5 funcions. Drupal community giving their best into UI improvements and because of that, they started Drupal 7 User Experience Project, IMHO nice example of really openning development to public.