Drupal 6 is without doubt an excellent platform from which to build and operate a website. But, like anything, as time passes new technologies become available and new ways of doing things hold the promise of making life easier. The latest incarnation of Drupal 7 (still in alpha stage at the time of this writing) promises to be head and shoulders not only above Drupal 6 but above anything else out there. I've been using the alpha version for about 4 weeks now, and I have to say, it's pretty impressive.

I think the first aspect Drupal 7 that really stands out, from the perspective of a website administrator, is the improved useability. It comes with an admin menu strip along the top of the page so there is no longer any need to download this in a separate module or visit the administration pages every time a bit of configuration work needs to be done.

Even better, the entire administration interface is now handled in a series of shadowbox overlays so you can administer anything from anywhere on the site without having to leave the page you are working on. This is a huge timesaver as you can image.

Image support is the next big area of improvement. Image styles and effects ship as part of the Drupal 7 core. Gone are the days of searching for and installing modules to do relatively commonplace tasks like scaling and cropping. Creating a 300x200 pixel grescale image for display in blog posts (regardless of the original size of the uploaded image) takes no more than a few moments to accomplish using the Image styles overlay.

Fields functionality is now also included in the Drupal 7 core. This makes creating entirely unique content types a breeze without having to download and install CCK or a multitude of other modules. The native field handling is far more elegant and is integrated into the not only node content, but comments and users too.

File handling has also been improved. Specifically, one real flaw with Drupal 6 was it's inability to implement private file handling (for security purposes) and CSS file aggregation at the same time. The problem was fairly severe because without CSS file aggregation, larger websites could break in Internet Explorer due to its inability to handle large number of CSS file. The alternative was to set file handling to public and run the risk of storing private or commercial documents within the document root. Glad that's over with...

There are plenty of other improvements too. Often little things that you barely notice - like not having to concern yourself with cron jobs or work on block and page throttling for performance purposes. These issues are now handled automatically behind the scenes - as it should be.

Overall, I can't wait for a stable Drupal 7 release. Much of the features that make Site prebuilder's distributions easier to use off-the-shelf in Drupal 6 are now included in the core Drupal 7 package. This means that we can start adding some real kick-ass features to the Drupal 7 distributions because all the basics are now handled in core.

Sweet...