Lessons Learned About Drupal 7

July 8, 2011 | by Jeannette Modic | Posted in CMS, Web Development

We recently launched our first Drupal 7 site for The George Washington University Medical Education Futures (GWU MEFS). We chose GWU MEFS as our Drupal 7 guinea pig because they had a pretty straightforward site. They didn't require any functionality from modules that haven't been released for Drupal 7 yet, and their site was mostly just content types and lots of views.

Challenges

Page Title module

We use this module on every site as a way to improve search engine optimization and usability. Unfortunately the Drupal 7 version of this module was not quite ready for production sites when we first installed it. Throughout our site build we ran into error after error from this module. The only way to fix the errors were to apply patches from the community. Luckily some smart members of the Drupal community provided these patches for the rest of us until the module could be updated and error free. While we were lucky that we didn't have to write a patch for these particular modules, these issues still took a chunk of our time that Drupal 6 wouldn't have required — having to troubleshoot the issue, find a solution, patch the file, and document the changes.

What we ran into with Page Title is just one of many modules that just aren't quite ready for production sites and extra time should be budgeted if you plan on using modules that do not have recommended releases.

Slow Performance

Our personal impression of the new usability enhancements is that they come at a cost. On this site we turned off the fancy overlay and admin menu that comes with the core Drupal 7 package and opted to go with the admin menu we use on all our Drupal 6 sites. We found this solution worked great in Drupal 7 and really sped up the site and our workflow because it gave quick access to the action we were performing.

We really hope the issues with the overlay we were having will improve as Drupal 7 develops because it is a great feature. But for now, we're happy without it.

Arguments in Views (now Contextual Filters)

My one complaint about these is that I haven't figured out how to use some of my old PHP snippets when the argument doesn't exist. With taxonomy terms as fields and the new rendering layer, it just isn't as easy to get the variable you are looking for in Drupal 7.

I think as documentation grows for Drupal 7 and more people use it, we will figure out these new changes, but this is the biggest learning curve we've faced so far.

Favorite Improvement in Drupal 7

Lots of little things make life easier in Drupal 7:

• Being able to assign a block to a region on the actual block editing page making a two-step process now only one step!
• Having the configuration links for each module on the module list so that you can go straight the configuring a module after you install it.  
• The great configurable quick links bar at the top for handy links you use often, which gives easy access to your most used pages.

So far, we think Drupal 7 is great, but we definitely have more to learn about the new improvements. We already have more projects in progress on Drupal 7 so I guess we'll get our chance to get more familiar and come to love Drupal 7 as much as we do Drupal 6!

What are your likes and dislikes about Drupal 7? Any other lessons you want to share?