What's new in Drupal 4.7?
Artem - January 12, 2006 - 13:27
I am rather new to Drupal, use 4.6 currently and constantly hear a lot of good things about coming 4.7. However, I cannot locate any kind of "what's new" list or whatever of this kind :)
Could anybody, please, point me to the information about what's going to be changed/added/improved in 4.7?
4.7 isn't actually finished
4.7 isn't actually finished yet, so that's probably why there is no official "what's new" available for it.
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www.bargainspy.co.uk | More Drupal modules
Any drafts?
I agree. However, there is beta 3 already and content is frozen, isn't it? Shouldn't there be at least some rough description on what's going to be launched?
I don't need a detailed list of improvements, I'd rather like to have a general overview on the main improvement points.
Off the top of my head some
Off the top of my head some newbies are:-
Free tagging in taxonomy.
Ajax powered user interface improvements.
Advanced search.
For developers there's the new Forms API.
--
www.bargainspy.co.uk | More Drupal modules
Why don't you install a
Why don't you install a 4.7.* as a test and try it out?
In my opinion it is much improved. I really appreciate many of the new features in it.
Recurring Events and Category modules
Some of the contributed modules are also getting a boost. The recurring events module and the category module are both of interest to me (neither of these is yet supported in 4.6-- and may not be). Other modules, like the views module, seem to have significant improvements. Views will be able to hook into more content with its API (or vice-versa). Also the CCK (content creation kit), has been rumored to be officially released as a contributed module for 4.7 (this is the next step up from flexinode and probably a big thing for future Drupal development).
There is also more flexibility in theming regions or blocks within drupal and titles of nodes are now controlled by modules, allowing more flexibility in how content is presented. Nice. These are the features that have me excited about the next release.
I installed 4.7 beta6
I installed 4.7 beta6 yesterday mainly because the developer of a module I'm using a lot in a new site encouraged me to do so - both because he's not going to support 4.6 any longer (in the module development) and because he said it's on its way to being a big improvement over 4.6. I figured if the site I'm building ever "goes anywhere," I'm going to be relying much more on the module developers out there than my own lame programming skills, so I should port to 4.7 now as opposed to later on when it'll be a bigger pain for me to do so ...
So far I've found two things:
1) Some of the new ways of doing things seem a little wonky at first but actually make more sense and are more powerful as compared to 4.6
2) The AJAX UI improvements rock
3) Some modules aren't yet functional in 4.7, and at least one that claimed to be wasn't ... Figuring out how to make it work taught me quite a bit both about Drupal (things like how forms are created in 4.6 vs 4.7) and PHP syntax ... So it took some time but was worth it
Now on to figuring out how to do custom block placement and such ...
Cheers,
nk