First alpha release of Drupal 7.0

Today marks the day of the first alpha release of the next version of Drupal: 7.0.

Whilst the release is by no means suitable for production/live websites, its still worth being aware of, and testing if out if you're curious about what it can offer.

The release focus's on improving the usability of Drupal, as well as bringing into core some critical 3rd party modules like custom fields on your content types (previously offered by the CCK module), an update manager so you can install your own modules from the web interface, and proper image handling. There's also a vast number of enhancements made under the hood to make theming & development easier, as well as improve performance.

There is no official timeframe yet on when Drupal 7.0 version 1.0 will be released (a version suitable for live sites), but if previous main Drupal releases are anything to go by, there's usually a month or so of alpha's, a month of beta's, and then the first version release. So keep your eyes and ears open during March/April 2010.

The official announcement about the Alpha 1 release can be found over on drupal.org.