It's now sure, Drupal 7 final release will happen on 5th January 2011. On 7th january there will be some Drupal 7 release parties in several cities around the world, perhaps near you too. You can follow the tag #d7rp on twitter to read about organisation messages about those parties all around the world, if you want to attend.
It is great to hear. It seems i will have to wait with moving my wordpress site to drupal, as the latest version seems very promising, and with a stable version it really will rock.
Just upgrade the Drupal 7 RC2 to full release, I didn't try the RC3 and RC4 because the X'Mas and New Year holiday. I'll go to the local Drupal 7 Release Party to celebrate and meet the Drupalers.
KORTRIJK, BELGIUM & CHICAGO, IL — JANUARY 5, 2011 — Drupal's worldwide community, along with the Drupal Association, announces general availability (GA) of Drupal 7, the most innovative web platform available. Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. Notable websites are WhiteHouse.gov and the many top music artist’s sites of Warner Media Group. Drupal version 7 (D7) features the latest web technologies and remarkable improvements to user experience (UX). Drupal 7 is already in production use by sites such as Examiner.com, which is among the top 100 in the United States. After relaunching in Drupal 7, Examiner’s traffic grew 19% in a single month, attracting more than 22.4 million monthly unique visitors. "New Drupal 7 features such as the field API, pluggable storage and cache, enabled us to use Mongo as a "NoSQL" solution for high performance and scalability, while the new unit testing framework ensures a very stable core, even over several large core-merge efforts throughout the project. Examiner.com, with its high traffic volume and instant publishing capabilities, would have been very difficult or impossible to implement on earlier versions of Drupal.†said Jim Davidson, President, Examiner.com. The Drupal 7 development program used a combination of contracted professional guidance and community-sourced feedback to arrive at best-in-class solutions for the Drupal 7 user experience (UX). UX enhancements provide easier administration, update management, accessibility, and content creation. Angie Byron (aka Webchick), Drupal 7 core maintainer, affirms, "Drupal 7 sports an improved new user interface, accessibility improvements, better image handling capabilities, support for rich content metadata, security features, scalability and database interoperability enhancements, a suite of 30,000 automated tests to ensure stability, and more. In short: it's a tremendous leap forward for the project and for website builders everywhere, we are thrilled to formally release Drupal 7 to the world." Drupal is an open-source software project powered by more than half a million people in more than 200 countries, who speak more than 180 languages. Nearly 1000 members of the Drupal community are direct contributors to Drupal 7 core, and thousands more develop contributed modules. "Drupal's phenomenal growth arose from Drupal 6; Drupal 7 represents a major leap forward in terms of usability, performance and capability," asserts Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal. "We welcome the world to a new chapter of developing for the Web and celebrate with worldwide Drupal 7 launch parties on January 7, 2011. Important new capabilities in Drupal 7 * UX Enhancements by a design for the 80% of users that makes common tasks easy, default settings smart, privileges the content creator, and simplifies administration. * Image handling out-of-the-box, resize, crop, etc. * Built-in, automated test environment featuring a continuous integration test suite running against every patch for long-term stability of the project * Version upgrade manager and migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 * Performance and scalability improvements that serve web visitors faster via advanced caching, content delivery networks (CDN), and master-slave replication * Custom fields in core, native data item fields for any content type, but also for users, taxonomy, and other entities, plus support for translations * Database abstraction layer, enabling the use of many databases, such as Maria DB, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL , or SQLite "NPR Public Interactive has been using Drupal 7 since the early alpha releases to build and pilot our next generation CMS platform for Public Radio and Television Stations," said Doug Gaff, Director of Technology at NPR. "Our customers are thrilled with D7's polished OOB experience, and we're excited with the many architectural and functional enhancements of the D7 platform." Drupal is open to the world with multi-lingual support and accessibility for people with disabilities. Drupal was recently used by the Dutch government for a project that required 100% compliance with the World Wide Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). Native RDFa Semantic Web Technology In Core Drupal 7 Drupal 7 is pioneering the rollout of RDFa for broad adoption of the Semantic Web. Increasingly, Google and Bing will rely on machine-readable structured data from websites they crawl. The design of Drupal 7 embeds semantic meta data that makes machine-to-machine (M2M) search native for a Drupal 7 website. RDFa can add value by giving search engines more detail, details not visible to humans, such as the latitude and longitude of a venue for display on a map; or providing the ISO date format for localization and proper display in the search results for different countries. About the Drupal Association The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the Drupal project flourish. The Association helps the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, events, promotion and distribution. The Drupal Association [association.drupal.org] is incorporated in Belgium. Learn more or download Drupal at http://Drupal.org
I am using Drupal on a shared hosting environment. I have had Drupal 6 for a couple of years now. Just installed Drupal 7 for test and it looks like it's slower than the previous version. Anyone cares to comment? I would love to move the the more feature rich D7 but at the same time it looks like in a shared Hosting environment the limited resources would limit its speed. Or maybe it's just the programming or both. Thanks,