The more things change...

...the more they stay the same.

I have been busily developing a couple of sites recently using Drupal-7 and despite it being markedly different in a lot of places, especially regarding the theme system, CCK moving into the core and the 'Manage Displays' feature landing (to name but a few I've noticed so far), I am finding that a good 90% or more of what I know of Drupal gained over the last five years is still relevant. And what a relief that is!

Pass the machete...

It means that I am still able to very quickly track down through the Jungle of PHP code and pinpoint functions and things that 'are new' to me and then take them on board. Sometimes those changes are so subtle you feel really stupid when you get it wrong! Case in point, the old style permissions hook module_perm is now called module_permissions and as well as the name change, the array of data that is returned is also different. But what a difference! It's really great to see how the Drupal 7 core has evolved from Drupal 6. Lots and lots of great changes that make life easier for us developers.

Manage Displays

So awesome once you get it! One of the more significant changes is the introduction of of rendering order / display list type of approach to the fields that make up a node now. As an aside, you can now firmly delete the body part of a node if you don't need it, boy that used to be an annoyance! Thanks Drupal team. Anyway, back to displays. What these let you do is to change the rendering order of the component parts of a node... back in D6 land you would have probably have had to write a template file just to do that. With a display, all you need to do is fiddle the CSS. Awesome.

I am really looking forward to getting stuck into the nooks and crannies of D7 more and more with each passing day as I find that what used to be slightly tricky in D6 is now much more intuitive... once you understand it.

I hope to be able to post some articles in the near future describing the changes that have made me happy, and maybe those that caused a few head-scratching moments as well so we can all get better at Drupal.