Electronovelty moves to Drupal 7

I've been following the progress of Drupal 7 for the last few years, doing an install every month or so and watching all the pieces come together. Since its official release, I've been itching to make a real live site with it, so I rewrote my business site, electronovelty.com, in D7. And you know what? I really like D7 and hope to do as much future work I can with it. The UX is so much better, and the way code and presentation have been further separated and have added much more hooks and overrides for theming, it makes many development tasks much easier. And of course, much of the stuff under the hood is so much better. Moving so many API features into core has made sites run much faster, and have eliminated many of the conflicts between contribs that sometime result in older versions.

Is it ready for prime time? I'd say so, at least for relatively simple sites. I figured the port would be an afternoon's work, which it was - at least the first 95% of it. The darned remaining 5% took me a few more days, as is always the case. I was pretty excited about some of the new features, like media handling, and had to wrap my head around some of the theming changes. I had the most fun with my portfolio page, using the galleryformatter with a little jquery to hide and expand screenshots and examples.

I did find a few small conflicts and things that just weren't quite right, but a little quality time with Google led me to patches and workarounds for most of them. Most of the contribs I like to use have been ported, or are on their way. The situation is much better than the move from 5 to 6, where the wait was longer for ports. Of course I have no business complaining if I'm not doing anything to help, so I'm trying to make patches for the little roadblocks I'm finding that I can share with the community, and will try to port a few contribs over as time permits. I particulary miss skinr and noderelationships.

The initial learning curve was far less scary than I feared it would be, and the API changes mostly make it easier to build new code and themes. I'm delighted at all the new functionality, and the performance improvements. Kudos to all who have worked so hard on making this happen.