I'm putting together an e-commerce-like site in the very near future (starting work this weekend hopefully) with an eye to getting something out there in the next month or so.
The question is which Drupal version do I use? I'll be subscription selling nodes which are hooked up to a backend system so as well as needing custom code I'll likely need:
- VIews
- Contexts
- Rules
- Content Profile
- + a load more
Trouble is, a lot of these are in alpha status for Drupal7. After playing around with what I can do I've encountered a few issues/bugs that I'm sure will be resolved but at what cost to my timescale?
Going with Drupal 6 has it's downsides though, namely I'll have a couple of years and then need to upgrade again but also managing custom nodes programatically with CCK is a pain in the bum.
TLDR
I'm looking for general population consensus on the best version of Drupal to develop with in the short term. Are alpha module versions stable enough for production? (My gut says no) Does the pain of bugs outweigh the issues I'll have with programatic CCK manipulation?
Comments
I'm in the same boat. Though
I'm in the same boat. Though my site will include e-commerce, it will have many other functions. I've never used Drupal before and decided to wait for the D7 launch before I started developing. Many of the features (modules) I am looking for are already created for D6 and may not be ported to D7 for some time, if at all - so it's looking like I will have to handle that workload, on top of custom proprietary modules. After a few weeks of dabbling around with D7, I've come to the consideration (since I am brand new to Drupal) of using D6 over D7 for several reasons.
1.) The amount and relevance of community created modules is vastly greater in Drupal 6 which would cut down on both time and cost of the sites life development.
2.) The D7 Documentation is lacking and incomplete. (Thank you to the volunteers that have contributed so far.) The documentation that is there assumes you have some sort of understanding of Drupal 6 as it refers to "changes." So I find myself redundantly going backwards and learning the basics of D6 so that I can understand the "changes" they refer to in the D7 documentation.
3.) I've encountered a few bugs with the D7 release. Nothing fatal, all new software has bugs. I'm sure Drupal 6 still has it's fair share, but dealing with the bugs - and trying to learn a new system takes some patience. With tons of examples to look at with D6, I find myself studying the core modules of D7 just to try and grasp Drupals basic concepts.
So if you read all that, I guess my opinion would be to develop on D6 for short term and low cost projects, and to stick it out with D7 for long term medium to high cost projects.