While Drupal 7 has been quite long in the making, it's going to be very different from every release before: we have added tests that make sure core works well. (BTW it took quite some time to write so many of them!) This allows the core developers to focus their attention on deeper problems which are much, much harder to fix. Instead of "OMG node preview is broken!" we now contemplate "you know, this new File API is great, but it won't work well with Amazon S3 because..."

Seeing user frustration with how long contrib modules took to become available on Drupal 6, we launched the D7CX movement to make sure contrib modules are ported to Drupal 7 by the time of the release. We should sing praises to the heroes of this movement who have ported their modules and kept up with the still-changing core APIs. If you want to join, note that the coder upgrade module helps.

D7CX and the introduction of tests have emboldened some companies to actually build huge sites with Drupal 7 even in alpha stage; their experiences have helped alert us to bugs and missing possibilities early in Drupal 7's life cycle, many of which we've already addressed.

All in all, by the time Drupal 7 comes along, it'll be a much, much higher quality release than anything before. This takes time. Please join us in making it happen sooner.

Also, there are more reasons that causes Drupal 7 to be late -- some important drives which were present in past releases are missing.

With previous releases, core contributors were more likely to push for a release so they could work with it as part of their day job. But this time many of them can work on it already.

Another drive toward early release previously came from the security team. Compared to the security enhancements from 4.6 to 4.7 and 4.7 to 5, the enhancements from 5 to 6 and 6 to 7 are relatively small. So the security team was pushing for Drupal 5 (so it did not need to support 4.6 any longer) and 6 (which allowed the team to drop the support for 4.7). But the team has no such issues with Drupal 5 and 6 and so this drive is missing now, as there are no such fundamental security flaws in Drupal 5.

Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 upgrade path

This has been a demanding task given all the architectural changes Drupal 7 has been through and one of the main show stoppers blocking us from releasing a beta version. As of this writing(1 of August 2010) we are again on the verge of releasing another alpha release or our very first beta release of Drupal 7. One of important tasks is squashing all the upgrade bugs. Please help out by looking into the remaining issues at drupal.org. We also need help running upgrade tests of running Drupal 6 sites to flush out undiscovered bugs.

Why is this important? Well, one of the main reasons is that as soon as we roll the first beta, the API will be frozen and all module maintainers will be able to start testing their Drupal 7 releases. We will be in better shape by not repeating the slow adoption we had in Drupal 6, which was due to important modules not making a stable release fast enough. See the D7CX movement.

(Thanks to the many contributors of this post.)

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