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Drupal 7 release party in Austin

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After two and half years of the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds of developers – Drupal 7’s release is merely days away. To mark the occasion, user groups from all over the world are celebrating as Drupalistas know best – with a party.

But we’re not the only ones – there are now more than 238 300 parties, in over 80 90 countries. This should be proof enough that Drupal enthusiasts all over the world are more than a little excited about January 7, 2011.

If you love Drupal and live in the Austin area, come join us the Boom Boom Room at Union Park from 6:30–9:30 PM. We’ll be talking about what’s new in D7, monitoring chatter and photos from other parties, Skyping with the NYC party, and toasting to the best version of Drupal yet.

Cost: Free!

RSVP: austindrupal7releaseparty.eventbrite.com OR groups.drupal.org

When: Friday, 1/7/2011, 6:30-9:30 PM

Where:
Union Park – Boom Boom Room (map)
612 West 6th Street
Austin, TX 78701

What’s new in Drupal 7?

Partial list taken from drupal.org/about/new-in-drupal-7

Security

  • More secure implementation for scheduled tasks (cron.php).
  • More secure password system.
  • More secure log-in system.
  • Modules can be updated via the web.

Usability

  • Administrative links to edit existing page elements are now available on each web page, without having to go to an administration page first.
  • Improved support for integration of WYSIWYG editors.
  • Added more drag-and-drop for administrative tasks.
  • Permissions now have the ability to handle more meta-data (permissions now have a description).

Theme system

  • Removed the Bluemarine, Chameleon and Pushbutton themes. These themes live on as contributed themes
  • Added “Bartik” theme as the default user interface theme.
  • Added “Seven” theme as the default administration interface theme.
  • Added “Stark” theme to make analyzing Drupal’s default HTML and CSS easier.

Database

  • Added query builders for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE, and SELECT queries.
  • Support for master/slave replication, transactions, multi-insert queries,delayed inserts, and other features.
  • Added support for the SQLite database engine.
  • Default to InnoDB engine, rather than MyISAM, on MySQL when available for greater scalability and data integrity.
  • Several Performance Improvements Implemented

File handling

  • Files are now first class Drupal objects with file_load(), file_save(), and file_validate() functions and corresponding hooks.
  • Files use PHP stream wrappers to enable support for both public and private files and to support pluggable storage mechanisms and access to remote resources (e.g. S3 storage or Flickr photos).

Image handling

  • Improved image handling, including better support for add-on image libraries.
  • Added a field specifically for uploading images, previously provided by the contributed module ImageField.

Added ability to add custom fields

  • Provides most of the features of the former Content Construction Kit (CCK) module.
  • Custom data fields may be attached to nodes, users, comments and taxonomy terms.
  • Node bodies and teasers are now fields instead of being a hard-coded property of node objects.
  • Fields are translatable.

…and much more!