After nearly three years of development, Drupal 7.0 is officially available. The latest release of the open source content management system that powers high profile websites like WhiteHouse.gov features a revamped admin interface, more flexibility options for content and more optimized code.

Drupal founder and project leader Dries Buytaert estimates that approximately 1,000 people contributed to Drupal 7. The Drupal community at large will be holding worldwide "release parties" in 88 countries on Friday, January 7, 2011. Mashable recently named Drupal one of the 10 websites to watch in 2011, in large part because of the improvements promised by Drupal 7. The CMS already powers approximately 1% of all the websites in world and we expect to see that figure only increase.

Drupal has always been well regarded in terms of its power and abilities; it's just actually learning and using the system that can take more effort. That's why one of the big undertakings with Drupal 7 (and something that will continue to be a focus in Drupal 8) is in usability, especially from an administration perspective.

The installation process has also received an overhaul — and Drupal might not quite match WordPress's famous "five-minute install" on live hosting environments — but on a local host, the process is just as simple.

The default installation includes built-in modules for things like OpenID support, forums and contact forms that you can enable or disable at will.

Check out this video the Drupal team put together showing off all of the hard work that has gone into Drupal 7.0.







Have you ever used Drupal to build a website? What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.