I've now created three different Drupal 7 sites, and I can heartily state that I'm pleased with where the community has come in the past couple of years—especially from a UX perspective (the admin overlay has actually turned out to work VERY well across all the browsers I use). I will be posting more impressions of Drupal 7 from a themer's perspective in the coming weeks (check out an older post on D7 theming here).
I'm going to attempt an upgrade of this website to Drupal 7, then walk through creating a new D7 theme (hopefully to be contributed back) for this site.
Now that D7 has hit release candidate, a full release (1.0) can't be too far off, and nothing helps improve Drupal more than to start moving smaller production websites on shared hosting servers from 6.x to 7.x! The more people that do this, the more people can help fix the lingering bugs that are keeping Drupal 7 from more widespread adoption by those already using Drupal 6. You see... everyone benefits!
Sadly, there are two or three sites that I won't be able to upgrade to D7 for a little while, since they have a boatload of custom code (although the Coder Upgrade module/site is extremely helpful for upgrading this kind of code!), and a few crucial D6-only modules.
I'm also tentatively looking forward to upgrading my Airy Blue theme and Gallery Archive module to Drupal 7... but am waiting patiently for other dependancies to get up to speed...
Comments
Well, now I *am* Drupal 7, though the growing pains hurt a bit. More tc.
Issues with the upgrade so far:
This is (so far) the most trafficked website that I've run Drupal 7 on, and I can say that there are still enough growing pains that I'm going to hold off upgrading my other medium-volume websites.
Most of the problems have to do with upgrade processes and tiny, but very annoying bugs under the surface. I do love the admin overlay and the nice backend improvements, though... what to do?
Yikes... been working on the site for about 8 hours now, and the menu system is totally wonked on this site. Probably something to do with the Administration links not being upgraded correctly, as well as the Primary Links menu.
Whenever I go in to edit a page, I can't see any menu options, and additionally, the menu is screwed up every time I save edited content. Yuck.