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Drupal 7 is Officially Here!

Jan 05, 2011  By Katherine Druckman
 in

The long-awaited new version of the popular web content management system and platform was released today. It represents the hard work of almost 1000 developers (by Greg Knaddison's count) and countless other Drupal community members contributing their time and effort to testing and providing feedback.

Drupal 7 will be the most user-friendly version of Drupal yet as a result of tremendous amounts of work overhauling the user interface to create a far more intuitive user experience. Among the goals of this redesign was to minimize the notorious Drupal learning curve and make Drupal site building more accessible to a larger number of people.

Of particular interest to Linux Journal readers may be the expanded database support Drupal 7 allows. With the aid of contributed modules, Drupal 7 sites will run on a number of databases, including the increasingly popular MongoDB and others. You might check out Daniel Bartholomew's article on SQL vs. NoSQL or Dreis Buytaert's post on the subject for more about why this is interesting. Ultimately, greater database support means more options and the ability to create solutions for a wider variety of projects.

For a quick look at Drupal 7, check out this video from Jeff Robbins

Drupal 7 Marketing Video from Lullabot on Vimeo.

Southwest Drupal SummitI am personally very excited about Drupal 7 and can't wait to get started on LinuxJournal.com's next upgrade. In the meantime, I am celebrating by co-organizing the Southwest Drupal Summit in Houston, Texas, on January 27-28, 2011. I encourage everyone interested in learning more about Drupal and Drupal 7 to attend. Angela Byron, Drupal 7 maintainer, will be there to give us all a tour of Drupal 7, and we'll have a streaming address and Q&A with Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project lead. As a community-organized event, the cost is extremely reasonable, and we'll have web technology experts from all over the world presenting a variety of topics to allow us to hone our skills. Among the fantastic speakers will be Linux Journal's own Kyle Rankin. Kyle will deliver a talk about forensics and actually dissect an attack, which is a no-miss for those interested in security. We have an amazing line-up of speakers, and I encourage you to read more about them.

I'm very excited to be a part of this event, and I hope many of you will join us!

p.s. If you email me, I'll send you a special Linux Journal reader discount code. ;)

______________________

Katherine Druckman is webmistress at LinuxJournal.com. You might find her chatting on the IRC channel or on Twitter.

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Is it any good at

Doug.Roberts's picture
Submitted by Doug.Roberts on Mon, 01/10/2011 - 16:57.

filtering SPAM?

:)

--Doug

Drupal Rocks!

Miguel Hernandez's picture
Submitted by Miguel Hernandez on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 12:04.

So glad that D7 has finally arrived but also VERY happy that it wasn't rushed out the door. Started building sites in Drupal 7 once the betas rolled around & there was an upgrade path available. I'm really excited about all the usability improvements, the improved scalability & how localization is available right out the box (not to mention the inclusion of many top contributed modules into Core, especially SimpleTest).

Sure wish I could attend the SW Drupal Summit but hopefully the sessions are recorded for those of us who couldn't be there in person. I'll just have to settle for seeing y'all @ SCALE again this year- I'll be in the LA Drupal booth again so come on over so we can geek out Druplicon-style. ;)

The best CMS in the world just got better.

Miguel Hernandez is the Founder & Head Geek at the OpenMindz Group, an IT consulting and web development firm in Los Angeles, California.

upgrading drupal with aquia

antoinette's picture
Submitted by antoinette (not verified) on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 00:23.

Any one know about updating drupal if you are running Aquia Drupal?

No actual "acquia drupal upgrade"

Miguel Hernandez's picture
Submitted by Miguel Hernandez on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 11:51.

Hello Antoinette. There isn't an actual Acquia Drupal upgrade so you should simply upgrade Drupal core. Here's the official guide: http://drupal.org/documentation/upgrade/6/7.

Keep in mind that before upgrading from one major release to the next (or even just updating to the latest version, ie. going from 6.19 to 6.20) you should have a working backup of both your entire site & your database. What I also do is take screenshots of my modules list so that I know what modules are enabled/disabled since a best practices approach includes disabling all contributed modules before the update/upgrade. I'm sure this is obvious to most but just throwing it out there as a friendly reminder. ;)

While I haven't written a step-by-step guide on updating/upgrading Drupal (& really need to since I get asked these things all the time), I *have* written a step-by-step guide on backing up your database. Hope it's a good start for ya: http://migshouse.com/content/database-disaster-recovery-step-step-guide
Good Luck!

Miguel Hernandez is the Founder & Head Geek at the OpenMindz Group, an IT consulting and web development firm in Los Angeles, California.

Drupal Upgrade Problems

crh's picture
Submitted by crh (not verified) on Wed, 01/05/2011 - 18:33.

There are a lot of postings today (1/5) on drupal.org where people are having problems upgrading from Drupal 6.20 to 7.0. I tried and failed.

Your problem might be a rogue module

Miguel Hernandez's picture
Submitted by Miguel Hernandez on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 05:51.

Hello, CRH. Drupal 7 is now including many contributed modules as part of Drupal Core. If you're using any of those, you should be fine. The problem most folks run into when upgrading from one major release to the next in Drupal are rogue modules. For D7, module maintainers were asked to include a promise on their project page that there'd be a full D7 release for their module. Sadly, this promise isn't always kept.

So if I was you, what I'd check is what modules you're running. Ensure that they're updated to their latest D6 version (pls tell me you're upgrading from D6 to D7 & not D5 to D7 hehe). Just go 1-by-1 until you have them all & try the upgrade again. Shouldn't have to do that, but just in case.

Miguel Hernandez is the Founder & Head Geek at the OpenMindz Group, an IT consulting and web development firm in Los Angeles, California.

6.20 to 7.0 'upgrade'

crh's picture
Submitted by crh (not verified) on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 10:12.

Okay Miguel, after your response, I figured I better give it one more shot.

1) Modified /etc/php.ini to include pdo.so (and mysql.so)
2) Installed php-xml (for DOM)
3) Garland was the default theme I was using so no change there
4) Followed the upgrade instructions

Drupal says everything went okay after running update.php and Apache serves up the pages but Blocks are not being placed where they are configured to be and I lost the menu to the primary links. Definitely not a clean upgrade!

This is a very basic install with no special/custom modules installed since I was using this Drupal install as a learning tool. I've dropped back to 6.20 for the time being.

Hmm weird but check this

Miguel Hernandez's picture
Submitted by Miguel Hernandez on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 11:33.

-Forgot to mention running update.php after upgrading but you did that.
-Did you run cron (again, shouldn't have to but we're troubleshooting after all)?
-You mentioned using it as a learning tool but did you customize the core install at all? What I mean is did you change any code (to learn/test)?
-You mention not having any contributed modules, are you sure you never installed any & just disabled them? Contributed modules should go in /sites/all/modules NOT /modules in your site's root. I ask because it's a common mistake that causes upgrade problems.
-Are you seeing actual error messages being displayed or just seeing incorrect functionality?
-Have you checked your logs for errors so we can know what's going on under the hood?

hope that helps.

Miguel Hernandez is the Founder & Head Geek at the OpenMindz Group, an IT consulting and web development firm in Los Angeles, California.

settings.php file

Miguel Hernandez's picture
Submitted by Miguel Hernandez on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 12:18.

Forgot the final question (& this might be it!):
You are using your old settings.php file, right (& not the one that comes w/the default Drupal install)?

Since your blocks & menu are messed up, I'm betting you simply kept the one that comes w/the default (& has to get copied then renamed from default.settings.php to settings.php- best practices say you should keep both). This would be in your /sites/default/ folder.

Since you, hopefully, created a backup of your entire site before upgrading what you'd simply do is copy your backed up settings.php file to your /sites/default/ folder.

Miguel Hernandez is the Founder & Head Geek at the OpenMindz Group, an IT consulting and web development firm in Los Angeles, California.

Drupal 6.20 to 7.0

crh's picture
Submitted by crh (not verified) on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 13:05.

Per the instructions, default.settings.php was removed and settings.php from 6.20 remained in ./sites/default . Then for the upgrade the ./sites directory remained untouched. This means that only the one php file remained ./sites/default/settings.php which was then made writeable for the later steps when update.php was run. Update report was good. There was no mention of reinstating the defaults.settings.php file. settings.php was then set to read-only.
I should also point out that this also means that everything in ./sites/default/files directory was not overwritten when copying over the new 7.0 files. Those files remained from 6.20 before running update.php.

I'm willing to try the upgrade again, let me know if you see any obvious omission.

Yes, I'm maintaining tar backups of both /var/lib/mysql and var/www

Regards!

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