By marcodublin on

Hi all,

I'm new to Drupal and to this forum. I've always worked with Joomla but I now want to migrate to Drupal and I want an advice on which version I should use, 6 or 7?

Is there enough support, docs and modules blocks for version 7?

Thanks a lot for your help
Marco

Comments

john_b’s picture

john_b commented

In Drupal a major version upgrade is a major PITA unless the site is very simple. Drupal 6 will be end of life when Drupal 8 is released, guess two years. Therefore building in Drupal 6 means you should exepct a major upgrade problem in two years, and you should at least pick modules with an upgrade path to Drupal 7 rather than ones which are Drupal 6 only.

That aside, Drupal 7 has a pretty good set of contrib modules now, has some important features D6 lacks, although Drupal 6 still has a larger and more stable collection of contrib modules.

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

marcodublin’s picture

marcodublin commented

Thanks a lot for your advice,

DrDru’s picture

DrDru commented

What is the significance of "end of life" for Drupal 6 in about two years?
If I create something that works and don't anticipate needing to make changes in the future, does it matter if the software doesn't have updates after two years? It will still work, right?
Or could security holes start appearing that won't be patched. That would make a difference!
Can you clarify the "end of life", end of support, significance? Thanks.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

Here's the Drupal 5 End of Life announcement: http://drupal.org/node/1027214

Or could security holes start appearing that won't be patched. That would make a difference!

That's a huge part of it.

~silverwing

DrDru’s picture

DrDru commented

That's a huge part of it.
~silverwing

Wow. Thanks for the answer. That's exactly what I didn't want to hear... but needed to hear.

jaypan’s picture

jaypan
Location Victoria, BC
commented

It's a hard decision to make John B is correct with all his points regarding upgrades.

The advantage of using D7 (now) - new functionality, longer lifespan, more scalable
The disadvantage of using D7 (now) - many contributed modules still have a lot of bugs in them, and the contributed modules that exist have not been around as long, and not as hard tested, so there won't be as much functionality in a module

The advantage of D6 - It's been around for four years now, so most 3rd party modules have been hard tested, and have few(er) bugs. Modules will often have more functionality as well, since they have been being developed for so long.
The disadvantage of D6 - shorter lifespan and less scalable than D7

Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.

baywebsoft’s picture

baywebsoft commented

I am involved in such a project.

cmsd’s picture

cmsd commented

Hi,

Having used Joomla extensively, I would advise you to go straight into Drupal 7. Otherwise you will be wasting your time contending with two versions of Drupal, and hence having to learn the differences between them, as well as the CMS itself. Drupal is much more complex then Joomla, although they serve different market segments/niches, in terms of CMS.

Go with Drupal 7 unless there is something specific that only Drupal 6 offers, i.e. modules for instance. Going with Drupal 7 will save you time and Drupal 7 will continue to be supported, after Drupal 8 has come out. Any websites you build therefore will have a much longer support life. There are also major difference between Drupal 7 and Drupal 6, which you don't really want to be contending with, when that is not the priority.

Ashley

Olof Resare’s picture

Olof Resare commented

Made my first Drupal 7 site a few weeks ago. I've been nervous about if Drupal 7 is stable enough and if the modules that I need are available etc etc. A lot of the modules are still in beta state but everything that i tried worked fine. There was a lot of new stuff to learn in Drupal 7 even if I've created about 15 Drupal 6 sites before. The base is the same as in Drupal 6 but almost everything is changed in some way. Even if i think Drupal 6 is really nice, Drupal 7 is better in a lot of areas. Some improvements are: better permissions(in Drupal 6 it was hard to give node permissions as I wanted and there was "permissions packages" like "give user permission to handle the site" when I actually would like to just give the user the permission to flush the cache), content are more often available in arrays/objects instead of rendered html as in Drupal 6. From now on i will build all sites on Drupal 7, but i wont upgrade existing sites from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 unless i really have no choice. Regarding the documentation i think its almost the same as Drupal 6. I really love that its possible to search for a hook and then i can see whats happening inside the hook(function calls and whats returned by the hook). I think Drupal is lightyears ahead of a lot of other cms/apis regarding documentation. I tend to get angry at other docs when I cant see what is happening inside functions etc, but then i realise that i got spoiled by Drupals awesome documentation and my anger morphs into a Happy Drupal Camper smile.

TonyV’s picture

TonyV commented

It really depends on what functionality your site requires. Do a bit of research to see if you need any specialized "contributed" modules that might not yet be ready in D7.

But if you're research shows that you don't need anything not yet stable in D7, then definitely choose it over 6. My firm hasn't started a new D6 site in over six months because of the fore-mentioned retirement of D6.

All other things being equal, always go with the latest version of Drupal if you can.