Drupal.org launched the latest, much delayed version of Drupal 7 with a simple press release and a promise that the content management system (CMS) is ready to compete with medium to enterprise software systems under its upgraded framework. As part of the roll-out Drupal.org, its members, software integrators and customers participated in a choreographed 300 event, 95 country launch party roll-out.
The launch of Drupal 7 has opened the door for integration of enterprise software systems and Enterprise 2.0 needs of CIO’s . The open source project has already created ripples within medium and large sized web development rollouts. According to Drupal.org the latest CMS incarnation offers highly scalable and secure web design solutions with dramatically reduced maintenance and time costs.
Some of the advanced features of Drupal 7 are:
- Support for RDFa the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation for embedding XHTML medata within documents as a technological building block for the semantic web.
- Updated error, security and testing frameworks with over 30,000 automated tests.
- Drupal now boasts advanced caching, master/slave replication
- Administrators and editors now have updated WYSIWIG editor and Admin panels
- Developers now have the Content Construction Kit (CCK) as a part of Drupal 7.
Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal and founder of Acquia in November estimated the total amount of all websites running Drupal was in the millions important source. Drupal web design examples include Whitehouse.gov, NPR.org, Examiner.com, Brown University and Chicago Public Media among many others.