Posted by kristin thompson on February 5, 2013 at 8:50pm
I have a client with a tight budget that I haven't been able to convince to upgrade until recently. The site is built on D6, but now that D8 is getting closer to being released I am wondering if it makes more sense to wait a little longer and rebuild the site on D8 and just skip D7 completely.
I worry the client will not be happy to upgrade to D8 within a year or two after moving to D7, but don't want to hold off too long as they seem willing to upgrade within the calendar year.
Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.
Thanks!
Comments
IMHO here are a few points to
IMHO here are a few points to consider:
While D8 is set to be "released" this year. it will be a bit before contrib catches up. Personally I felt D7 contrib didn't catch up until a year or more later. To this day there are still many modules that do not have a stable D7 release, or have even started their port. D8 contrib might not take a full year to mature, but it still won't be ready for a moderate to large site out of the gate. So, you are looking at at least 1 year or more before you can begin the upgrade from D6 to D8.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If the website is working for them, and there aren't new features that only a newer version of Drupal will provide, then leave where it is. Yes, D6 will be deprecated but it's pretty solid. There are also many more D6 sites running around out there than there were D5 sites. I would bet there will be a secret underground of the drupal community that keeps D6 somewhat alive. It's going to be like the XP version of windows. However, this is debatable.
I guess you are hitting "the" sour point of Drupal here ...
Wait for D8 or get going with/upgrade to D7?
Why not stay with D6?
The problem is that Drupal is not just one thing - not just the core script / CMS.
Drupal (and others) work because there are so many modules written and maintained by others.
Drupal5 is out. But there are still plenty of sites around in D5.
D6 must have the biggest share of the market and is solid now. Why upgrade? D7 has not even yet all the modules for lots of sites in D6 - so upgrading is a no.
New sites - sure go for D7 - if you can find all the modules in working order you need.
So, D8 is there somewhat too early, not all modules have been upgraded to D7 - some may decide to jump ahead or to be dropped.
Drupal could easily become the victim of it's own success.
More business go broke because of too many orders - not too few. Why - cash-flow. These businesses are successful and do not have the cash to grow and move ahead.
Same could happen to Drupal - if there is not enough cash-flow = modules being upgraded then Drupal could go broke. Because at some point the upgrading of modules will fall apart as people get fed up chasing Drupal's development pace of the core.
Happens to Firefox and Thunderbird - constant full version upgrades and key modules (add-ons) fall behind.
Microsoft and Co. would not upgrade at that pace. First they need to capitalise on the latest OS & related programms before moving to the next one. This brings some stability for the user and commercial sense to the business plan for these corporations.
Same for Linux and all those distros - no match for the stability of Windows or Mac OS. With more stability and clarity in the the Pinguin camp Microsoft & Apple would have to be worried.
I hope you can see the parallels - back to the Drupal 6,7 or 8 question?
And btw - I only have one project in D7 and the clients haven't asked for upgrading their sites - yet. Not true - one is downgrading to a static, non-CMS site.
One more btw. - I wrote about this ages ago in respect of going / starting with D7. I wanted to refer to it here - but can't find the thread in my 22 pages or so of posts - something is not working well with trying to search your own posts on drupal.org - "could do better, much better" - not even Google seems to find it .......
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Good luck .....
... more recent results of trying Drupal just once are -
www.native-power.de
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