By mainebob on

I've been using Drupal 5 for a few projects over the past few months.

I have a new project that will involve new programmers familiar
with PHP (LAMP).

Is Drupal 6 ready for prime time yet. I wonder around this
site and find modules like ACL and others are not ready.
http://drupal.org/node/246162 (Bug in Drupal Core [breaks]
node access admin).

Among other things, We need the ability to have both public and private forums.

I love the shiny new features of 6 but am concerned that underneath it is NOT ready....

*** This is a How Soon will it be ready?
OR
*** Do you think it is ready NOW? (Maybe I'm overlooking
some aspect of the big picture)

I'd love to get the new people trained on Drupal 6 and save the
time and cost of upgrade (and new training) from Drupal 5.

Thank YOU!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

darumaki’s picture

darumaki commented

I've been looking into D-6 too, I made a list of the current D-5 modules and compared them with what was available for 6, so far many have been ported to 6 but a few still not ready yet, I am seeing if I can work around it, perhaps upgrade and add the other modules when they are ready.

My only worry is upgrading, last I tried on a test server, found many errors. In the database, I found some junk in the trunk, left over module residue from uninstalled modules that never cleaned up after themselves, maybe that is what causes issues, not certain. I am thinking of installing a new and then re-write all the content by hand sucks I know but, it's the only way I can be sure the database is clean of the gunk. I also think we are suppose to disable ALL modules before we upgrade which may have been the problem. The wordpress database was always easy to understand and import/expert data, Drupal database is atrocious and not so easy to figure out.

I think you can move to D-6 with just the bare modules you need and try to find alternative ones that can get you going until the ones you need get ported to 6. That's what I'm looking to do.

onelittleant’s picture

onelittleant commented

"I am thinking of installing a new and then re-write all the content by hand sucks I know but, it's the only way I can be sure the database is clean of the gunk."

Don't forget node_import. You should not have to re-write a single line of content. I've used node_import to successfully migrate thousands of nodes from both Drupal and other CMS systems to new Drupal installs... of course, node_import isn't ready for D6 yet...

TonyV’s picture

TonyV commented

I was just talking with a colleague about this the other day. It seems that major modules such as views and cck are far enough along in beta that they are really pretty stable in 6. Having said that, my best advice is to put some good time into setting up a "sandbox" install of 6 so you can get familiar with it and its capabilities.

I find that you really need to use the new product to be able to predict what you can and can't get away with in the future. I know this doesn't really answer your specific question, but just my two cents. I feel your pain.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC

As If’s picture

As If commented

This is a relative term - and a moving target. In my personal experience, for any site that needs the CCK Module, the Views module, and images within nodes (and let's face it, that's almost any serious commercial or community site): Drupal 6 is less ready now than it was 2 months ago. I just rolled a new client back to 5.10 after blowing a week on 6.4.

-------------------------------------------
Interactive Worlds and Immersive Obsessions
http://www.asifproductions.com

As If’s picture

As If commented

A few weeks ago I finished my first "major-incident-free" D6 development project. I used version 6.8. So just to make it official, IMNSHO, D6 is now ready.

BTW I do want to give big love to all the people who worked on the db schema for D6. I do a lot of migrations, and from a database standpoint D6 is frikkin beautiful.

LVX
TF

-------------------------------------------
Interactive Worlds and Immersive Obsessions
http://www.asifproductions.com

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Just wait for d7-- it's shaping up to be unbelievable.

darumaki’s picture

darumaki commented

A display of errors when I tried to upgrade to 6 from 5.7

An unrecoverable error has occurred. You can find the error message below. It is advised to copy it to the clipboard for reference.
Please continue to the error page

An error occurred. /update.php?id=1&op=do
Fatal error: Call to undefined function taxonomy_get_vocabularies() in /modules/forum/forum.install on line 113

continuing..

user warning: Duplicate entry '6-1' for key 1 query: ALTER TABLE profile_values ADD PRIMARY KEY (uid, fid) in /includes/database.mysql-common.inc on line 374.
user warning: Unknown table 'advforum_last_post' query: DROP TABLE advforum_last_post in /sites/all/modules/advanced_forum/advanced_forum.install on line 31.

The update process was aborted prematurely while running update #6000 in forum.module. All errors have been logged. You may need to check the watchdog database table manually.