There are approximately 38 critical issues that need to be resolved before Drupal 7 beta gets released. For more on these beta blocker issues check out: Drupal Core Improvements.

With this post I want to encourage you to install Drupal 7 alpha, test it out, and ultimately help to fix the critical issues and speed up the beta release.

You'll need a localhost LAMP or XAMPP environment to follow along with the examples here. If you don't have one set up I recommend using the Acquia Stack Drupal Installer.

Once your testing environment is configured, download Drupal 7.

Installing D7

Save the installer to your localhost Drupal /sites folder and extract it. Set up your MySQL database using your preferred method. Note to developers: D7's new database abstraction layer will theoretically support multiple database types including SQLite, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and Oracle. So if you are running Oracle you may be able to use D7.

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