I don't mean any of this as a rant, but after working on numerous drupal 6 to 7 upgrades, I feel like offering a suggestion I thought of earlier today while working on yet another seemingly needlessly complicated migration.
There are no shortage of posts that many are concerned about the path of drupal generally and some are shying away due to poor upgrade paths and not agreeing generally with future roadmaps and the work this creates for developers, module maintainers, etc. Personally I think drupal is quite good, those with limited dev experience can do great things with it, those with strong programming skills can still benefit, but upgrading in particular is often a nightmare except for the simplest of sites. This is not entirely uncommon with -some- other cms systems however.
As drupal really grew with d6 and now more with d7 many of the larger adopters have yet to go through an actual version upgrade and when they do they may or may not change their opinions/adoption of drupal - this part only time will tell... In the last few weeks I've learned more and more (in part by looking at alternatives with similar feature sets and better backwards compatibility) about where drupal is heading and I'm mostly intrigued. That said, I have one interesting suggestion....
- I would suggest that drupal.org be the first site that is upgraded to the new version of drupal - before releasing it into the wild. That's right take one legitimate production website and make it all happen in the new version before a release.
So instead of ... http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupalorg/drupal7 , for example, taking place months and months after a release... you simply eat your own dog food first....
I wonder if this would help clarify development goals and/or bring some clarity to disagreements on release schedules, etc.
Just an idea....
Comments
I guess I'm not surprised
I guess I'm not surprised there are no comments on this , but the more I think about it I think there is some merit to the idea...
At RC 1 of the newest drupal version drupal.org begins migrations plans
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At release date the party starts with a flipping of the switch to the new platform on drupal.org and then it gets released out to everyone.
Seems like a great idea to me, something for all to celebrate about and be proud of, and a step that exudes confidence in the product in both it's overall form but also in it's ability to be moved onto and utilized in a production environment....
Interesting note I just read
Interesting note I just read from tikiwiki (not comparing them - just a highlight for the production stability of the project as a whole)
"Tiki is much easier to upgrade.
*.tiki.org sites are always running the latest stable or LTS version as this helps improve quality and performance. In fact, *.tiki.org sites are upgraded to new versions (thus twice a year) in the alpha and beta stage before the new release becomes official. By contrast, over a year and a half after the release of Drupal 7, drupal.org is still running Drupal 6: "To help pull it all together Angie 'webchick' Byron compiled a team of 23 awesome developers from across the community.". This is yet more proof on how much easier an all-in-one app (like Tiki) is to upgrade. Tiki even has Pre-Dogfood servers so the community can check daily on upgrade success!"