Drupal 7

I had gotten as far as installing Drupal 7 a couple of times in the past year, but over the holiday, I tried to actually set up a Drupal 7 site for the first time. I was surprised to find that the ecosystem still doesn't quite feel ready for prime time.

At first, I thought it was just that stuff had been moved or reorganized. I spent a surprising amount of time searching for how to do stuff. The interface is quite different. But then I realized that some things that I have come to count on are simply missing, like not being able to select an alternate theme while logged in as a particular user. I still haven't figured out how to get the system to rebuild cached images.

Many D7 modules are also not ready for prime time. The new LDAP module is still unfinished. The ImageMagick ImageAPI Module doesn't seem to work. I saw comments that Themekey and others weren't really usable.

I don't mean any of this to be a criticism of Drupal in general or even Drupal 7 in particular. There are a bunch of aspects to Drupal 7 that show fundamental restructuring the makes the whole enterprise more robust. The Field UI, in particular, is a huge improvement that generalizes how to build forms. Still, I wonder when (or if) Drupal 7 will reach the same level of functionality/stability that Drupal 6 seems to have.

We talked a bit about these issues at our local Drupal users group meeting and the challenge at trying to choose whether to adopt a module for special purpose functionality or cobble together something from the basic underlying components. Calendaring has always been a bit of a challenge. Most people now seem to build calendaring functions using CCK, but if you look for a "calendar" project, there really isn't one. And setting up a calendar with CCK is still a lot of work. It's often hard to know how to do something that won't leave you in a cul-de-sac when the next version comes out. It's a fast moving target.