Using Drupal, 2nd Edition

Appendix D. Major Changes Between Drupal 6 and 7

A lot of basic concepts from Drupal 6 are still present in Drupal 7, but there have also been lots of changes in the new version. The Drupal 7 release cycle was the longest to date, which gave developers a lot of time to pack in a ton of new features as well as make some significant changes to existing features. For those people coming from Drupal 6, we’ll take a look at some of the biggest changes and note any “gotchas” to look out for.

New Features in Drupal 7

Let’s start off with things that are new in Drupal 7 core. Some of these are brand-spanking-new, while others are features that used to be in contributed modules for Drupal 6 that have now been integrated into core. These are the biggest items from a long list that you will notice right away and will have an impact on your new sites.

New Themes

The first thing that many people will be struck by with Drupal 7 is that it looks quite different when you first install it. There is a new default core theme, named Bartik, shown in Figure D-1. Bartik was written from the ground up as a new, modern design that also provides a guideline for theming best practices. Bartik offers many more regions for structuring the site than Drupal 6’s old default theme, Garland. Like Garland, it also has “Color module integration,” which lets you recolor sections of the theme, such as header background and links, in the appearance settings.

To help visually separate Drupal’s backend and frontend, Drupal ...