I love Drupal but..

By cursor on 18 Mar 2009 at 05:50 UTC

Okay, the headline was really to catch your attention. Actually I love Drupal, and I use it on many of my site, but there is one big thing that keeps bugging me - upgrading.

No, nt the actual process of upgrading from 5.x to 6.x for example, but moving the modules in particular. What happens is that module developer usually end up developing or adding features to the version they use, and therefore you either have backports or none at all. Sometimes, I really want to use D6, but the module I really want to use is only for D5, so I am stuck with using everything D5, even though D6 is better.

So, I am wondering isn't there a better way to do this? What if we can create a module translator module or something similar? That way you just develop your modules for one version, and the rest can be derived from it? Maybe the module translator does the lifting of form changes etc?

Is this possible or I am thinking crazy? :)

Comments

Module translator

RobertPope commented 18 March 2009 at 15:01

I would love to see a module like this built, I realize that many times the underlying changes from 5 to 6 require an entirely different approach - but a "legacy" module would be nice. Ideas for an interface admin/configure/modules/legacy - have it detect modules in the modules directory with checkboxes that you can use to run those modules in legacy mode. A similar translation module would be nice for the subtle php differences between 4 and five as we move into Drupal 7.

I would imagine such a translator module would have to create several new and independant tables to keep the drupal database from being corupted - perhaps it could be handled using a "virtual machine" style appraoch?

Just random ideas

Robert

ALSO - it would be nice when upgrading modules we have the choice of download AND install - that way the site would download and install the file directly without having to do the middle step of downloading it and then uploading it back again.

There is the deadwood module

nevets commented 18 March 2009 at 15:08

There is the deadwood module that does much of the heavy lifting in converting a Drupal 5 module to a Drupal 6 module. The coder module while it does not perform conversion can check Drupal 5 modules for required and suggested changes.