Hello Drupal 7! Install & Admin

Drupal is like my little not-so-secret weapon. It's very powerful, contributed modules make it easy to launch useful & interactive websites, and with just a few minutes of tweaks it's an SEO machine.

I'm psyched about Drupal 7 all while dreading the endeavor of upgrading.

I installed the Alpha-1 version of 7 on my laptop to give it a spin, and I have to admit, it's a nice step forward.

The administration is simple, fast and clean (as I'll show you), and the new functions of core are much needed.

The install process was similar to v6, though the template is new. It does give an option of a "Standard" install, or "Minimal" which has fewer modules enabled...I went for "Standard".

One helpful new feature of installation is the option to have the system email you when there are important updates (to core or modules):

Once successfully installed, you'll immediately notice the new admin bar at the top.

Clicking on the menu items in the admin bar do not bring you to new pages like the admin menu module did in Drupal 6, instead you get a thickbox-like pop-up where you can post content, enable modules, or do whatever it is you do from whatever it is you selected (there that covers it all).

So, for example, when you click on "Content" (and the sub-option "Add content", you are presented with a list of content types to publish something new.

If you create an Article (a new type that seems to replace what was Story) from here, the pop-up updates:

Scrolling down from there finds a cool new standard feature, the ability to create a URL alias:

Also standard out-of-the-box is the configuration links for blocks when you hover over one:

Clicking on that brings the appropriate pop-up up:

What's very cool about Drupal 7 is that you can actually set a block to only appear on a particular content type:

Of course one of the things many are excited about in Drupal 7 is the ol' CCK module has been incorporated into core, and is now called "Fields".

The administration of Fields looks identical to CCK (at this point):

Also in Core is poormanscron and filefield.

It's been a while since I've seen an update on the forum module, but my understanding is that forum posts will now be nodes instead of comments. This will mean greater flexibility with forum posts.

Another bonus for site builders is you can customize an admin dashboard. If you find yourself doing many of the same things over-and-over, you can quickly add elements to your dashboard for easy access.

It's not all a bed of roses in Drupal 7 though. There are other features I would have liked to see, but considering 1) it's free, 2) I didn't help code, then how exactly can I complain? I can't, Drupal and the Drupal community are great.

But...I want more!

Here's what I'd like to see:
Views in Core. 'Nough said.
Enhanced Polls. Polls should be more than just a question with choices to vote on. It should be that plus a body field like a standard node.
WYSIWYG. Hmmm, I could have sworn WYSIWYG was going to be in Drupal 7, but I don't see it. Appears to be just better support for it.
Enhanced taxonomy. I feel Drupal's current taxonomy (vocabulary/tagging) is too limited. Two things which should be doable are unique vocabularies per user (if you have a site where every user has a blog, you want them to have their own vocab), and cloned terms under multiple parents (i.e. you could have a "hotels" child term that would appear under all cities you have as terms without having to create it a thousand+ times).

As of this posting there's 196 critical issues in the way of Drupal 7's launch. The alpha is usable on your computer (install WAMP) to start playing around with it now.