By lemonstar on
As a Joomla user (2 sites only so far) - I'm happy with what I've seen with Joomla but I've decided to come and find out for myself how Drupal compares.
I'm sure I could spend hours digging this info out of the dirt unless someone can quickly lay their hands on some useful links.
Is there any realistic release date in mind for 7?
I read several comments to the effect that Drupal development places a higher priority of forward thinking development than backward compatibility so I wonder if starting with 6.4 might mean that I'll soon have a site that needs a lot of re-engineering to move to 7. A version number of 6.4 suggests it is going to be potentially more stable than a product at 7.04 for example.
cheers
Neil
Comments
Depending on what features
Depending on what features you want, you may wish to use version 5.x; here are two recent discussions:
http://drupal.org/node/295488
http://drupal.org/node/310529
(Not sure about drupal 7, but its far enough away that I personally would not want to wait for it)
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Drupal Association
I am a writer, researcher and solo drupal freelancer.
No definitely do not wait
Edit: noticed the post above - I would suggest 6 not 5 at this point. About 2 months back I would have said 5, but not any longer... I wrote about it earlier today in the post I also linked to below. A lot of people mention "modules not ready for Drupal 6", but they don't usually mention which. In my experience almost all necessary modules are ready for 6. More esoteric/specialty modules may not be, but then again many of them may "never" be (it depends on if the people who created them want to upgrade it, and if it's an uncommon module, there's less of the community to help it along). Some modules won't be upgraded because there are already better replacements in the new version. In the same way various modules are left at 4.7 and go no further.
No definitely do not wait for 7. It is still heavily under development, and will likely be up to a year away (or more before the contributed modules catch up). Version 6 of Drupal actually is only recently becoming the version of choice (from 5).... it took a bit longer than usual for 6 to catch on since two of Drupal's most powerful/important contributed modules (CCK and Views) decided to go with a complete rewrite at this time (new features, performance, UI, etc). Drupal 6 will be supported for probably (it's hard to say) at least around 2 more years (until Drupal 8 comes out, whenever that is). Speaking of CCK and Views, they are "the big thing" in Drupal, and part of what make it so powerful - for a newbie friendly guide, please have a look at the article mentioned in my signature. Those two tools actually put the abilities of an expert developer into the hands of those of us with little to no programming skills, letting us make fantastic things with little to no programming.
I posted some info for another Joomla user the other day which you might find helpful: http://drupal.org/node/313355
You will probably find Drupal a bit challenging compared to Joomla, but if you stick with it, it is well worth it (I am a convert from Joomla myself). I strongly suggest checking out the free one day pass for the Drupal Essentials training course (and consider paying $25 for one month if you can't cram it into one day, it's about 7 hours of video training... there's also an excellent Joomla 1.5 course in there, so either way you'll get your money's worth... time is money as they say... the videos would save you a lot of time getting up to speed). If you prefer, Lullabot.com has a beginner video course as well, though I haven't watched that one.
Good luck, and welcome to Drupal :)
-- David
absolutecross.com
[new guide/lesson in progress: Creating a CCK and Views powered Drupal site - feedback welcome]
stick with version 5
Stick with version 5 for live production sites. Drupal 6.x still has a lot of issues and Drupal 7 is a long time off.
There's also a new "commercial version" of Drupal (it's free with commercial support) called Carbon, which is in beta and is based on Drupal 6.x.
A lot of core drupal developers are working on Carbon full time now, so, it's worth checking that out as well. When Carbon is finished, their "Drupal 6 fixes and patches" will hopefully flow back into the Drupal 6.x quickly. Otherwise, I can see a lot of Drupal users and developers simply switching to Carbon, instead of using Drupal 6.x or 7.x
Phillip, please don't say
Phillip, please don't say things like "Drupal 6.x still has a lot of issues" without pointing out even a single one. What issues?
Regarding your Carbon comment: http://drupal.org/node/300999 ... (your earlier post about your theory regarding carbon, people don't tend to agree).
-- David
absolutecross.com
[new guide/lesson in progress: Creating a CCK and Views powered Drupal site - feedback welcome]
..
There are over 1,000 active issues for Drupal 6: Link to issue queue. As a guestimate, I would say only about 100 of those are serious issues and my own opinion is that Drupal 6.x will be ready for production/live sites jan 2009.
There are around 2,560 active issues for Drupal 7: blog article by webchick
Regarding Carbon, I think it's not difficult to assume that because many of the core Drupal developers are now working with Carbon full time, many serious developers willl switch to Carbon (which is based on Drupal 6.x) and many more will download it for free, opting to not pay for commercial support, regardless if Carbon fixes/patches find their way back into Drupal core.
I think that's relevant information for a first time user who asks advice on which version of Drupal to go with.
Clarifications
Hi Phillip, let me clarify a couple things. Drupal 6 is the Drupal community's best and latest release. Anyone can file an issue against Drupal 6 but that does not mean that that the release is incomplete, it's just a reflection of an open process. Those issues were reviewed and decisions were made about what to fix and what to leave out of this release. While Drupal 6 is not perfect, it's the community's best release yet. If you are making recommendations about when Drupal 6 contributed modules will meet your needs then please clarify between the Drupal 6 release and Drupal 6 contributed modules.
While you are welcome to your own opinion about what issues are serious, the release is FINAL. There will be security updates and there may be bugs being fixed (6.4, 6.3, 6.2, 6.1 ), there is no active effort to add new features to core. Your statements could be interpreted that you believe the Drupal community is actively working through those thousand issues you cite. This is not the case. See the Drupal 6 changelog diff for examples of what is changing. Effort is now focused on making improvements to the new development branch, HEAD and what is referred to as Drupal 7.
Let me also address your statements about "many of the core Drupal developers are now working with Carbon full time". Acquia's development process is to work directly with the Drupal community and participate actively in the Drupal community releases. For Drupal 6, there were over 700 unique contributors to Drupal 6. I've detailed Acquia's core contributors, 14 engineers out of over 700, and provided tracking links so you can see how they contributing directly back the community in my blog post Talk is silver, code is gold: Acquia's code contributions to the Drupal project.
While the Acquia Drupal distribution provides valuable choices, to imply that core developers are not working closely together on the Drupal community development process, and have some how segmented is misleading and without evidence. In fact it is contrary to the evidence I've detailed in my blog post.
Kieran
Kieran Lal
Drupal 5
For a comparison, Drupal 5 has more then 500 open issues in the queue. Also, quite a few of the issues are getting backported from Drupal 7 and 6 to Drupal 5 (except in cases where they belong to new stuff or entirely rewritten APIs, etc), so these numbers are not standing on their own. Also, issues are used to track problems as well as new feature requests and tasks to do, so the number of issues is not necessarily an indication of number of problems. So it is hard to tell if a version is stable by the number of issues alone.
I'd say you should look for number of modules released, great new functionality such as the just released Views 2 module, which is only available for Drupal 6 and is most probably never going to be available for Drupal 5. Ultimately it is always up to you, if you don't find the required functionality available for Drupal 6 and you are not going to participate in helping to make it available (or you don't do it yourself in-house), then just opt for the version where it is available.
acquia..
Just updating this thread.
Acquia Drupal is out of beta and available to download now.
http://acquia.com/downloads
It's based on Drupal 6.x and has a few extra (contributed) modules included in the main download.