Drupal 7 Alpha Notes

There was noted improvements and changes in the Drupal 7 install. I run Drupal 7 on my own hosted sites. If you have a fantastico option in your hosting you might be used to installing Drupal that way, as Drupal 7 is still in Alpha it is not in Fantastico as a package yet. Once it becomes a full release fantasico will make a package available.

Until then if you want to try Drupal 7 you will need to download the Alpha version here http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-alpha6 or if you do not have a host available to upload a Drupal 7 site to please check out Druapl Gardens, here you can create your own Druapl 7 site and it is hosted on the Drupal Gardens cloud.

Install Notes

There was noted improvements and changes in the Drupal 7 install. I run Drupal 7 on my own hosted sites. If you have a fantastico option in your hosting you might be used to installing Drupal that way, as Drupal 7 is still in Alpha it is not in Fantastico as a package yet. Once it becomes a full release fantasico will make a package available.

Until then if you want to try Drupal 7 you will need to download the Alpha version here http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-alpha6 or if you do not have a host available to upload a Drupal 7 site to please check out Druapl Gardens, here you can create your own Druapl 7 site and it is hosted on the Drupal Gardens cloud.

Theme Notes

There are changes in Drupal 7 theme development for the best explainable please see drupal.org/node/254940

I chose to create a Drupal7 theme from scratch as I tried to load in some current themes to use as a base however with the changing nature of Drupal 7 Alpha theme development it was to unstable. It is easier to rely on your own code in these situations, I did not need a heavy theme and only something basic. Also I tend to prefer to start from scratch myself but that is because I love theming and have been working with PHP template engines for over eight years now. So the theme used on this site was created from scratch, using the general recommended theme construction.

The theme consists of a html.tpl.php, page,tpl.php, template.php, theme.info, and various other views, content and module specific templates. All up the theme has a total of around 9used template files, 3 CSS files and two specific JQuery and Javascript files. The simplicity of the design of the template allows for the code to be lightweight and flexible to accmodate changing template calls etc with Drupal7 Alpha updates/bug fixes.