The long-awaited new version of the popular web content management system and platform was released today. It represents the hard work of almost 1000 developers (by Greg Knaddison's count) and countless other Drupal community members contributing their time and effort to testing and providing feedback.

Drupal 7 will be the most user-friendly version of Drupal yet as a result of tremendous amounts of work overhauling the user interface to create a far more intuitive user experience. Among the goals of this redesign was to minimize the notorious Drupal learning curve and make Drupal site building more accessible to a larger number of people.

Of particular interest to Linux Journal readers may be the expanded database support Drupal 7 allows. With the aid of contributed modules, Drupal 7 sites will run on a number of databases, including the increasingly popular MongoDB and others. You might check out Daniel Bartholomew's article on SQL vs. NoSQL or Dreis Buytaert's post on the subject for more about why this is interesting. Ultimately, greater database support means more options and the ability to create solutions for a wider variety of projects.

For a quick look at Drupal 7, check out this video from Jeff Robbins

Drupal 7 Marketing Video from Lullabot on Vimeo.

I am personally very excited about Drupal 7 and can't wait to get started on LinuxJournal.com's next upgrade. In the meantime, I am celebrating by co-organizing the Southwest Drupal Summit in Houston, Texas, on January 27-28, 2011. I encourage everyone interested in learning more about Drupal and Drupal 7 to attend. Angela Byron, Drupal 7 maintainer, will be there to give us all a tour of Drupal 7, and we'll have a streaming address and Q&A with Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project lead. As a community-organized event, the cost is extremely reasonable, and we'll have web technology experts from all over the world presenting a variety of topics to allow us to hone our skills. Among the fantastic speakers will be Linux Journal's own Kyle Rankin. Kyle will deliver a talk about forensics and actually dissect an attack, which is a no-miss for those interested in security. We have an amazing line-up of speakers, and I encourage you to read more about them.

I'm very excited to be a part of this event, and I hope many of you will join us!

p.s. If you email me, I'll send you a special Linux Journal reader discount code. ;)