Drupal 7.50 has been released

Drupal 7.50, the latest release in the Drupal 7 series as of 8th July 2016, is now available for installation on websites running the 7 series of Drupal. Drupal 7.50 contains a variety of new features, performance improvements, security-related enhancements, and bug fixes – the 7.50 release itself includes no security fixes (although if you haven’t installed previous updates the 7.50 release will include previous security fixes).

Drupal 7.50 is a version jump compared to the previous 7.44 release; this is due to this Drupal 7 release being larger than past releases as it includes a few more changes and new features than normal updates. You can view the release announcement for more information about Drupal 7.50 on the Drupal website.

Notable changes in Drupal 7.50

There are a variety of new features, performance improvements, security-related enhancements (although no fixes for direct security vulnerabilities) and other notable changes in the Drupal 7.50 release. A roundup of the key changes can be found below:

Improvements to help search engines index your site’s images/CSS/JavaScript

Modern search engine web crawlers read images, CSS and JavaScript (just like a regular web browser) when crawling a site, and they use this information to improve search results.

Drupal’s default robots.txt file now includes rules to allow search engines to access more of these files than it previously allowed them to, which may help certain search engines better index your site and will help improve search engine ranking in some cases.

Protection against clickjacking enabled by default

Clickjacking is a technique a malicious site owner can use to attempt attacks on other sites, by embedding the victim’s site into an iframe on their own site.

To stop this, Drupal will now prevent your site from being embedded in an iframe on another domain.

Support for full emojis, Asian symbols, mathematical symbols

If you have been clamoring to use emojis, it’s now possible on Drupal sites!

Improved support for recent PHP versions, including PHP 7

Drupal now supports the latest versions of PHP, including PHP 7.

Improved performance (and new warnings) when Drupal is trying to find a file that does not exist

When Drupal cannot find a file that it expects to be in the filesystem, it will no longer continually search for it on a large number of page requests (previously, this could significantly hurt your site’s performance). Instead, it will record a PHP warning about the problem.

Drupal upgrade service

We can upgrade your Drupal website for you with our cost effective Drupal upgrade service. Contact us for more details or if you’re an O’Brien Media website hosting customer you can view your Drupal version information and request an upgrade via Client Connect, just log in and access the “My products” section for more information.