Drupal 7 goes end of life on 5 January 2025

Learn more about Drupal 7 End of Life at https://www.drupal.org/about/drupal-7/d7eol/partners 

Drupal 7 has been out since early 2011. You can find the latest version of Drupal here.

Here is a summary of the features included in Drupal 7. You can also see the complete Drupal change log here.

Minimum System Requirements:

This is not a complete list of requirements. Please read the complete list of requirements.

  1. Database: MySQL 5.0.15 or PostgreSQL 8.3
  2. PHP Version 5.2 or higher
  3. PHP Memory: 40M - 64M

Security:

  1. Secure implementation for scheduled tasks (cron.php).
  2. Secure password system.
  3. Secure log-in system.
  4. Modules can be updated via the web.

Usability:

  1. Administrative links to edit existing page elements are available on each web page, without having to go to an administration page first.
  2. Support for integration of WYSIWYG editors.
  3. Drag-and-drop for administrative tasks.
  4. Permissions have the ability to handle more meta-data (permissions have a description).
  5. User 1 created as part of the installation process.
  6. Features included the default install profile (tagging on the Article content type).
  7. Setting up automated task runs (cron) can be achieved via Drupal's configuration alone, without having to install any scripts on the web server.
  8. Password strength validator to make it kinder, gentler, and clearer.
  9. "Input formats" renamed to "text formats".
  10. Support for default text formats to be assigned on a per-role basis.
  11. Text format permissions on the main permissions page
  12. "Vertical tabs", a reusable interface component that features automatic summaries and increases usability.
  13. Time zone support
  14. "Shortcuts" module to allows user to create their own menu for the pages they visit the most.

Database:

  1. Query builders for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE, and SELECT queries.
  2. Support for master/slave replication, transactions, multi-insert queries,delayed inserts, and other features.
  3. Support for the SQLite database engine.
  4. Default to InnoDB engine, rather than MyISAM, on MySQL when available for greater scalability and data integrity.

Several Performance Improvements Implemented

Documentation:

  1. Hook API documentation included in Drupal core.

News aggregator:

  1. OPML import functionality for RSS feeds.
  2. Feed update options.

Search:

  1. Support for language-aware searches.

Testing:

  1. Test framework and tests included.

Theme system:

  1. "Bartik" theme included as the default user interface theme.
  2. "Seven" theme included as the default administration interface theme.
  3. "Stark" theme included to make analyzing Drupal's default HTML and CSS easier.

File handling:

  1. Files are first class Drupal objects with file_load(), file_save(),
    and file_validate() functions and corresponding hooks.
  2. Files use PHP stream wrappers to enable support for both public and private files and to support pluggable storage mechanisms and access to remote resources (e.g. S3 storage or Flickr photos).
  3. Includes a field specifically for uploading files, previously provided by
    the contributed module FileField.

Image handling:

  1. Image handling includes support for add-on image
    libraries.
  2. Includes a field specifically for uploading images, previously provided by the contributed module ImageField.

Support for Multisite Installations

Includes RDF support

Support for search engine optimization and web linking

Ability to add custom fields

  1. Provides most of the features of the former Content Construction Kit (CCK) module.
  2. Custom data fields may be attached to nodes, users, comments and taxonomy terms.
  3. Node bodies and teasers are fields instead of being a hard-coded property of node objects.
  4. Fields are translatable.

Installer can be run from the command line

JavaScript

  1. Core JavaScript library is jQuery version 1.4.2.
  2. jQuery Forms library is 2.36.
  3. jQuery UI 1.8 is included, which allows improvements to Drupal's user experience.

Node access control system

Task handling

  1. Can handle long-running tasks.