Meta tags (Nodewords) for Drupal 7 Delayed

It has been some time since Drupal 7 has been officially released on the world but one of the major modules used by many, Nodewords, has been late to the release party. Nodewords has been turned into Meta tags for Drupal 7, which for me I never understood why it wasn't named meta tags in the first place. However, my ramblings about naming conventions still does not help the fact Meta Tags for Drupal 7 has still not been released and is giving webmasters headaches to this very moment.

Now, I know that search engines rarely care anymore for keywords and most meta tags, but that does not stop those who pay the bills for creating the sites wanting the comforting and pleasing feeling that they are there. I believe the only meta tag I really need right now is the description meta tag, as it is used by Google and many other search engines to show a summary of the content on the search page. Without it, search engines just take a random amount of text at the top of the page and that shows up on the search page, which for many articles is incoherent and would be better off changed by the author.

I hope the Meta Tags module comes out soon since for my paid sites I have no choice but to use Drupal 6 if they want to use drupal as that is a feature they all want.

Link: Meta Tags Module Project Page

XML sitemap module for Drupal 7

For all those who are braving the adventure into Drupal 7 and wish to use the xml sitemap module, make sure you use the 7.x-2.x-dev version as the recommended 7.x-2.0-beta1 version does not work. Hopefully, they will get their dev version to beta soon and recommend it because there are a lot of users who are confused as to why the recommended version of the xml sitemap module does not work and simple think that means all versions do not work with Drupal 7.

Link: XML Sitemap Module Project Page

Drupal 7 - The Early Days

Drupal 7 is turning out to be a CMS that I like a lot more than Drupal 6. The ease of updates and installs of modules, themes, and views is an amazing change from that of previous versions. In addition, one of my favorite modules in Drupal 6 was the CCK fields. Without them, I would never have used Drupal in the first place. Now, a form of the CCK fields has been implemented in the core version of Drupal 7, along with using those fields easily in views and arguments. In addition, no errors whatsoever from the Drupal 7 core.

However, it appears many module maintainers were blindsided a bit with the final release of Drupal 7. Certain modules like XML-Sitemap and even Views for a couple days were really buggy and had to push releases out it seems to not break. Weird enough, many modules "recommended" versions don't work with Drupal 7 while their older development and alpha versions do. Even to this day, module support is falling behind a bit but with time I believe they will catch up. But as it stands right now for those currently running Drupal 6 with a lot of module support, do not think of upgrading for a couple months.