Drupal 6 sucks, there i said it

Here's my list of complaints.

A dependancy on Views and CCK which are not finished. This hold ups the upgrade of Drupal and modules dependant on these two modules packages. Views and CCK are not documented well. Neither user or developer documentation is up to par. Also trying to figure these out and document them for yourself is too time consuming and would add a year on to any project.

Developers trying to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 are getting stuck in the middle of their upgrades because of how complicated the system has become. It seems that there is only one or two people that understand v6 well enough to help them which is spreading things thinly. This is probably the cause of many module releases having bugs and conflicts.

What did you find that makes you want to go back to Drupal 5?

Hiveminds Magazine | FireOrb | Drupal Street | Drupal offline manual

Wouldn't that be like putting 1912 T-Ford engine into a 2008 Maserati? Basically all the stuff is there but it would never work. I think the only way would be to chuck all your Drupal 6 files, drop its tables and start completely anew.

Personally I have been fiddling about with Drupal for only a couple of weeks and I found its technical possibilities, its documentation and the help you get in the forums better than any CMS i have ever worked with before...

As far as I know, downgrading a 6.x database to 5.x is not practically possible, so it is not just a lack of documentation.

About the rest, maybe you found bugs or maybe Drupal 6 doesn't have the right tools for your project. Impossible to answer in any meaningful way with the information you provided.

--------- Edited to add:

"Downgrading" your site is very easy if you have a backup of your old 5.x database. You just put your old files back and load the old database.

Anybody who can't provide actual information (this doesn't work, that is inconvenient, etc...) isn't worth wasting time on.

...that this has not been said before on this website:

• Drupal 6 is one of the most modern, technologically advanced CMS'es available, free or not.
• Drupal is probably easier to learn than Typo3, but more difficult than most others.
• If the modules you need to use are not yet available for D6, stick with D5 until then, or develop them yourself.
• Do your development work on a local system or a dedicated account.
• Keep a journal of your development process so you can replicate what works.
• People have contributed much effort to create Drupal, and if your criticism does not have some positive aspect they may take it personally.

I suspect this is too late to help jaymello, but it may help others avoid his predicament.

I've been using drupal 6 for awhile now and I'm am considering downgrading to drupal 5. For me, it's not so much the lack of modules, I found all the ones I need, it's the overall performance that really sucks bad. I have more issues on drupal 6 then I ever had with drupal 5, they should really have labeled drupal 6 as a beta, with warning signs saying use at your own risk. I spend more time on issues then I do on content, the cache thing is very annoying on drupal 6. The very least, there should be a way to downgrade successfully between the two, this should be standard with all releases.

Drupal 5 is faster, better, more stable, even the cache is better. I'll admit drupal 6 does have a few extra admin features, although I would not consider them must have features. In reading the drupal 6 release post again, it's a lot of hype, I can only wonder what kind of hype will be with drupal 7.

A drupal 6 analogy comes to mind, frozen dinner in a box, looks wonderful on the outside but inside is cardboard.

Personally, I would like to see design separated from code, this too should be a standard for all CMS systems, design has no place being intertwined with code. I can't even design the way I want without having to code stuff, that's where MODX CMS beats drupal hands down, it keeps the two separate.

It sucks that I'm even considering going back to drupal 5, I'll have to redo-everything from scratch. My advice for drupalers is boycott drupal 6, use only 5.

Thanks Jaymello, never had the bottle to say that myself. Drupal-6-core just isn't the granite-rock Drupal-5-core was. I hope that changes soon. Nuff said.

Nope, dont agree, Drupal 6 rocks. From someone who spends the best part of 10-12 hours a day and more building Drupal sites and themes, I have to say I way prefer working with D6.

I'm doing about 50/50 D5 & D6 sites and themes, way more orders for D6 themes than D5 so I suspect plenty of others are getting the dev work done on D6 just fine (some of these themes are pretty complex and clearly they are using plenty of modules).

I've been using Drupal since before 4.0 was released and I now have 3 Drupal based sites, all of them still running Drupal 5. I still haven't upgraded any of them to Drupal 6 since too many modules I use (including views, cck, buddy list) still aren't compatible.

Every major version upgrade has been a major ordeal. I usually have to wait many months after a major release before I upgrade until the modules have caught up with it. Now there doesn't seem to be any effort to bring many of the modules to Drupal 6, with most of the effort going into Drupal 7.

*PLEASE* make a bigger effort to maintain backwards compatibility with older modules and make the upgrade path a lot less painful.

I also use WordPress for my blog, and I've been a lot happier with it. Unlike Drupal, they've managed to avoid breaking anything with major upgrades. Every upgrade I've done, including 1.x to 2.x, have been completely painless and took less than 15 minutes, without breaking anything. Yes, I know WordPress is a lot simpler than Drupal, but I really wish the Drupal developers would put more emphasis on making upgrades less painful.

I'm seriously considering moving one of my sites, which is content heavy and not really dependent on community features, to WordPress or something else. I'd lose some of Drupal's features, but I'd have a much easier to maintain site that I could keep up to date with fewer problems.

--
Mike Cohen, http://www.mcdevzone.com/

I tried, I really did. I spent two weeks converting a project from 5 to 6. Today, I spent a few hours starting over with 5, and got much farther, with more satisfying results. Fortunately, my site was in early development and I still had my old files to work from.

First off, I love Hunchbaque, which seems to have stalled in its development for 6. Many of the tried and true modules that work in 5 are either unavailable or in early stages of revision (many months after the release of 6). This isn't a complaint against those hard working individuals who create these themes and modules -- it's just an honest observation that now is not the right time for most website builders to use 6 unless they have a frontier spirit. I want to get my site done. Others enjoy tweaking the guts of CMS. To each his or her own.

Second, I was surprised to discover how foreign 6 seemed to me. I've Googled for more answers, work-arounds, and solutions in the last two weeks than my entire career as a developer. I've been working with Drupal for two years, and I own the Mercer Drupal book, the VanDyk-Westgate Pro Drupal book, and Chaffer-Swedberg's Learning JQuery. Not a pro, but not a newbie either. But I have a deep sense of compassion for anyone starting out with Drupal and having pick the way through seemingly simple issues only to find themselves hours and days later on a bizarre and winding trail. 5 was manageable. 6 is not.

And finally, it's always easy to dismiss a commenter like jaymello as a troll. That's a cop-out. Jaymello's complaint was pretty mild and clear in its frustration. And although jaymello didn't submit a fully articulated thesis to support the claim that D6 is awful, it was and accurate claim so far as I can tell.

Back to work.

I'm in the process of building my first website with drupal, which also happens to be my first real website. I have zero, yes ZERO webdesign experience (well, some dreamweaver and alot of wikipedia, but nothing too serious) and was ecstatic when I stumbled across Drupal.

When I began development of my site I took for granted that I should install v6 but you all are giving me second thoughts.

I'm green enough that i'm not expecting play with code (yet). This makes me very dependent on user-contributed modules. On the one hand, I have experienced a little frustration when I find a module that looks useful and see it's not compatible. On the other hand, I feel that it might be prudent to stick with modules that are receiving enough developmental attention to be compatible with 6.

In any event, I'm only just starting and the latest upgrade has temporarily stalled my development because, again, I have no idea what I'm doing so the simplest tasks take forever because I have to look everything up. In any event, I'm considering using this as an opportunity to start from scratch with v5, and thought I might be able to get some interesting views from this thread. Thoughts?

It's hard to be specific now, I've erased my brain's ram and refilled it with D5! Honestly, I'm working with every "darn" production tool known to graphic arts (Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Indesign, Pagemaker, Quark, Gimp, and so on... Mac and PC). When I move from one program or project to the next, I swear the only way to think is to clear my noggin.

A few notes on 6 based on what little I can recall:

I hated drag and drop. It doesn't matter to anyone else who likes it, but I couldn't find a switch to disable it and that really irritated me.

I hated having to create content in order to build my menus out. In 5 you can create menus with all kinds of content that doesn't exist yet (standard in the professional web development process is to first build out the site map, second plan all of the core pages and their various processes based on purpose, third build the graphic design, and fourth to create the content with all kinds of follow-up testing and revision; D6 won't let you create non-existent links. Maybe it helps prevent 404 errors and potential database problems, but I don't like having a baby-sitter.

On the Zen theme -- like the idea, don't care for the execution. It had so much HTML and CSS built-in for design contingencies, and enough bloat that I had to reject it. No offense to anyone who created or uses Zen. I think Hunchbaque stripped out more of the excess HTML and styles. However, I appreciate the fanaticism of both themes for web standards.

I'll wait another 6 months and then take another look at Drupal 6. And that's my recommendation.

I find people amusing who carelessly toss out convenient labels like toxic people or trolls, especially when the conversation is not so politically correct. More often then not, these same people who use these labels are the ones who are toxic and trolls, they would rather live in fantasy internet-land then deal with real issues. They sugar-coat things and always seem to have an easy answer for everything.

I guess truth is for hard core truth seekers so for those who can't handle the heat, don't let the door hit you on the way out. This topic is for the real Drupal users.

[ contemplating the meaning of existance, what else would I be doing ]

Every major version upgrade has been a major ordeal.

That's the key, there, folks!

Think about it. Aren't MOST upgrades of ANY technology just like that? Basically, the more advanced/complex a system/tool is, then the more difficult the upgrade can likely be.

Take for instance, Windows, the most popular desktop OS:
Windows 98... to XP - major problems for some people..
Go all the way back to when many apps ran totally/primarily in DOS - they had to make some HUGE changes to get to where they'd work accurately within Windows, especially beginning with Windows 2000, ME, XP.
And now Vista - again, whole 'nother list of changes.

I think it really depends upon WHAT you are upgrading as to whether it will be easy/difficult for the users.

Besides this, if you're a web designer, you're not just supposed to be a writer. You should know enough about the code/ideas to at least attempt to work around your issues. Drupal isn't really built for the end website viewer, or for someone who just wants to "set it and forget it." If it were, it wouldn't be as powerful as it is.

That power is what drew me to Drupal. Yeah, I've got a lot to learn, and I've got not really enough time to do so, but being that Drupal is FREE and so stinking amazing powerful with the options/flexibility, the possibilities are endless. I know I'd like to some day get into the module development stuff. Probably would be best to start out helping maintain an existing one, before trying to create my own. But there again - it aint easy, and that's why we're not all module developers.

In life, anything that is worth anything takes some work. Drupal is no exception.