Drupal 7: First look

I’ve had a fair amount of exposure to Drupal over the last year or so as my employer has embraced it as our web content management system of choice. One thing that has always frustrated me is the steep learning curve and non-intuitive user experience. Drupal 7, released today, strives to fix all that. Facilitated by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt, the Drupal 7 User Experience project put usability and user-centred design at the forefront of priorities for improvement. Hooray!

Despite this move toward a more intuitive and user friendly experience Drupal will always be a complex beast to wrestle with. This is inevitable since it offers so much functionality drives such a wide range of websites. Perfect timing then to be sent the book: Drupal 7 First Look. The book covers all the new features and improvements. There’s plenty of focus on the theme API changes which are of specific interest to me. I can’t wait to see if the developers have dealt with some of my gripes about the lack of control of (some of) the HTML Drupal spews out.

I like to spend a bit of time absorbing the content of new technical books like this so expect the review in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime you can download a sample chapter PDF for yourself.