By stevelancey on

Hi all,

I am having the following question:

I am quite new to drupal, but want to give it a chance for a medium sized project (around 3 man years of effort). What Drupal version should I use for the development? 6 or 7? These are the things I am taking into account / asking myself when making the choice, but please let me know whether I am missing anything

- I know that Drupal 7 is around the corner, but with any new version, there will be plenty of bugs
- If I hire decent Drupal 6 developers, what is their learning curve for using Drupal 7?
- How fast can I expect contrib modules to be updated (OG,...)
- If I go with Drupal 6 initially what is the effort of migrating it to 7?

Thanks,

Steve

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x

Comments

theabacus’s picture

theabacus commented

Many of the popular modules maintainers have pledged to have a full version of their module available on the day of D7 launch (#d7cx: http://drupal.org/project/modules?solrsort=sort_title%20asc&text=#d7cx). OG is supposed to have a version available on the launch of D7.

lphm’s picture

lphm commented

As any new project of development, it is important to begin to work on a healthy and stable base.
It is the case with Drupal 6.

The next arrival of the new version 7 does not want to say the sudden death of the version 6! After your own project will be ended, you can envisage an upgrade towards the version 7. Drupal always supplies a changelog to migrate without too many difficulties.

Good luck!

bojanz’s picture

bojanz commented

Riding the wave (using the latest and greatest) pays off by having you on top of the technological curve.
However, it is possible only if you have a team of capable developers who know how to CONTRIBUTE BACK.
Otherwise, you will just lose time and get frustrated.

I'm developing an affiliate module for Drupal 7 at the moment, which integrates with Drupal Commerce (D7's shiny new ecommerce system), Views 3, Rules 2, and other alpha software.
It is interesting and rewarding, but bugs do happen, some functionality will certainly be missing, so all that needs to be done & a patch provided, plus issues discussed, etc (I contributed to Views and Drupal Commerce because of that. It's great fun!). This gives you a way to influence important things, at the expense of your own time and money.

The short version: My default and sound advice is going with Drupal 6. It's stable and has a large and stable contrib. You can concentrate on building your project instead of concentrating on the technology underneath.
The time needed to move to Drupal 7 depends on which modules you choose to use and how good you build your site.