The popular open source content management system Drupal releases its latest version today. Drupal 7 has been three years in the making, with code from thousands of contributors from over 200 countries.
Drupal 7 includes a number of improvements to both performance and usability. The enhancements to the UI mean easier administration, update management, accessibility and content creation. There's also a new image editor that allows users to re-size and crop photos without having to leave the platform.
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In order to help website performance, Drupal 7 offers advanced caching, content delivery network and master-slave replication. It also includes a new automated testing framework with over 30,000 built-in tests, something that will allow users to check the integration of patches and modules in order to help maintain platform stability.
Drupal 7 also features RDFa semantic technology as part of its core. The design of the platform embeds semantic metadata that will make machine-to-machine search native for a Drupal 7 website. RDFa will be able to give search engines more details not visible to humans, such as latitude and longitude of a venue. According to Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert, "Adding semantic technology to Drupal core will make a notable contribution to the future of the web."
The Drupal platform has seen increasing adoption, powering hundreds of thousands of websites, including a number of quite prominent ones, including WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.