By nyumbani_yangu on

I have an "e-catalog" site which is based on Drupal 5.19 version and its already been running well for about 3 years. I have not touched it a lot, neither given it much maintanance (it behaved pretty well on its own)

I would like now to have the site upgraded and improved, both in its design and in its functionality.
I would like to have some suggestions from the community in regards.

I am planning to eventually enable the site to being an e-commerce in the future. This won't be done as a high priority thing, but I would like to upgrade the site in a way that I can later pick it up and enable it for e-commerce.

At the moment the site uses CCK to constructs products (custom drupal nodes). Those would have to be changed into being e-commerce nodes (but I am not sure how this is done lately with the newest versions of drupal and the newest ecommerce support modules).

So my question is: What Drupal version would the community reccommend on using for this purpose?
The site will basically be an online catalog of products, with some extra informational pages and a contact form, nothing special apart from the fact that it will have to be e-commerce one day.

Comments

john_b’s picture

john_b commented

The obvious solution is basic Drupal Core + Views. And / or Ubercart. Upgrading from D5 you have to go via D6. Wjhether it makes sense to go all the way to D7 as part of a single project is a difficult question, and it depends on your situation IMO. Drupal 5 is end of life so should be upgraded. Drupal 6 works well. I did an upgrade to Drupal 7 recently on the basis that I knew the site might be growing in complexity and size and I wanted to to the upgrade before that happened. There are pros and cons. On the basis of the information you give I do not think it matters whether you stop at Drupal 6 and leave the upgrade until Drupal 6 is end of life, or whether you go to Drupal 7 (unless you have important contrib modules for which there is no stable D7 upgrade path).

Moving to Drupal Commerce rather than Ubercart, if you are selling online, is a more complex question, depending partly on who you believe about the claims that Ubercart will have long term ongoing support.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors