Drupal 7 - First Impressions...

Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

As a web developer who works with Drupal (5 & 6) on a daily basis at work, naturally I am getting excited and intrigued by what Drupal 7 will bring to the table. A colleague of mine at Sift, Dan Slinky has just published www.openslinky.com and wanted a theme for it. I took the challenge and thought I would post my first impressions on working with Drupal 7 for the first time...

Drush

I am pleased to report Drush works as expected with Drupal 7 (as Drush is version ambivalent this is to be expected, but you can never be too sure!). First thing I did was to change into the root directory of a fresh drupal 7 installation and download the Zen theme to base the Open Slinky theme on. Anyone who is not using Zen to base their themes on... stop what you are doing, put down the theme you are struggling with and go download Zen... your productivity will sky rocket I assure you! The changes made in the Drupal 7 version are small, but they all add up to make a sizable time reduction in installing and configuring.

Dashboard

The Dashboard - a lovely usability touch, along with the inline editing links. These are the things that many developers will pick up on right away, but having worked on a number of projects at Sift Groups utilising Zen themes and the Admin module this is nothing really new to me, although I love the fact that they have been added to core!

Zen

Speaking of Zen, there are a couple of nice little changes to the Starterkit theme that will make working with Zen even nicer (in my opinion!).

Firstly, there is a new structure in place for organising your themes files. In Drupal 6 you had to copy the Starterkit theme into the root directory, then follow the instructions in the readme.txt file to ensure you copied the right files across from the main Zen i.e. all the .tpl files and the correct layout.css for your site (liquid or fixed). In the Drupal 7 version, installation has been made easier as many of these steps have been removed. All that is necessary now is:

1. Install Zen theme to root themes directory
2. Copy STARTERKIT from Zen to the root theme directory
3. Rename all instances of STARTERKIT to in template.php and .info
4. Done...

Yep, thats it! You now have a fully functioning Zen sub theme to call your own! Fixed layout is now default in Zen sub themes, this is easily changed by changing the file path in the .info file to the liquid CSS file as both are included in the starterkit, no need to copy the one you want any more.

Zen Structure

The file structure in the new Zen sub themes has changed as well - it is much more structured with a directory for CSS, js, and images - previously only images existed and the others had to be created manually (if you are OCD about that kind of thing like me!), not a huge task but another step that has been removed all the same.

The CSS files have also been further split, gone are the days of copying in the liquid or fixed styesheet and naming it the same as your theme - we now have seperate stylesheets for:

• page backgrounds
• pages
• forms
• fields
• nodes
• blocks
• navigation

Of course, some of these were present in the Drupal 6 version, and you could have made the others yourself but as I said, many small changes make a big difference.

Zen & Mobile Web

Some other nice touches in Zen are the future inclusion of a mobile css AND an iPhone CSS - hopefully this will go someway towards quelling certain developers who seem to want to trash the iPhone rather than praise it for the way it has opened up the mobile web. I say future as the .info file contains:

; stylesheets[handheld][] = css/mobile.css
; stylesheets[only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)][] = css/iphone.css

But these are commented out (as you can see), plus the files are nowhere to be found - I await these additions eagerly!

Blocks

Leaving Zen behind now, my attention turns to the blocks system in Drupal 7. I haven't played with this extensively but the one thing that jumped out at me is that the main page content is now considered to be a block, meaning that you can position your page content in any region of the page should you wish.

I can see this being particularly useful for locking down page content without actually locking down the whole page. There may be more advantages to this but I can't think of any at the moment!

Vertical Tabs

The many collapsable fieldsets used in node edit pages seem to be no more (yay!). They have been replaced by a way more friendly vertical tab system (see below). In my opinion this is a much nicer way of hiding sections until they are needed, for a start the page doesn't move around whenever you click a link which could cause you to lose your position, and lose track of what you were doing and all of your options are clearly displayed for you without having to scroll up and down the page... win!

To be continued...

Well I'm giving up for now, I will no doubt post more thoughts / ramblings as I progress with Drupal 7 development...