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By garry79 on
I first started dabbling with Drupal last September/October time and Drupal 7 fell at the first hurdle (when it was still a beta version) so I switched to Drupal 6. I'm just now thinking of taking it up but wondering if I should start on Drupal 7 or is still buggy. I've made some progress with 6 version and been reading a good developers book on it so not sure. What do you developers put there do when a new version comes out- is there a good source on the internet which fills in the gaps or do you buy a revised editions of your books?
Comments
Just created a
new site, frabatomagi.com and I used 6.22.
Thats because 7 simply does not have the variety of modules 6.x has.
Sooner or later though i'll probably switch. But 6 works extremely well,
Is tried and tested to death! Reliability is key. Ill only switch to 7 if i
really really have a big reason to :)
While not all modules have
While not all modules have been upgraded to Drupal 7, the most popular/useful contributed modules do have a stable release. Sometimes modules are never upgraded to the next major release of Drupal because they're not being actively maintained.
Another thing to consider is that Drupal 7 has a lot more functionality built into core than Drupal 6, so you won't need as many contributed modules to build a fully-featured site. Starting with Drupal 7 now will save you the work of upgrading the site, and is a great opportunity to use all the new features that Drupal 7 has to offer.
To play devil's advocate...
... a lot of modules have not been ported to 7, and there doesn't exist any alternatives that I have seen, in a number of site applications I looked into.
You really need to do a lot of research to determine whether your 7 site will do what your 6 could. If it can, I suggest 7, because the interface is better (well, I did prefer the old Views) and obviously it's a little more future proofed. However, you will need to extensively determine any functionality before considering 7 vs 6. We still develop some sites using 6 - there's no option.
Now?
And now in April 2012, what are your thoughts on the proliferation of modules upgrading to 7 AND functioning correctly?
I've spent years in D6 and am just now getting to going through every module I use for D6 and looking up and downloading the D7 counterpart to see what is available and what isn't. This is going to be a long, arduous process.
Any advice? Still using D6 or should I now make the jump to Drupal 7?
I strongly advise not to jump
I strongly advise not to jump over to D7.
Unless you are ready either to sacrifice the stability and/or cease using required modules entirely.
.
The advice really will always be the same. You need to look at your site's needs and decide if everything you need is available in Drupal 7 or if you are able to help make it so. You don't need to download all the modules in D7 to see if they have a D7 version and using http://drupal.org/project/upgrade_status will help as well.
"the most popular/useful
"the most popular/useful contributed modules do have a stable release"
No, not at all. Some of most popular, yes. But when I started to look for necessary modules, I found out Drupal 7 is still not ready for production use.
I suppose it will not be till the announce of Drupal 8. Which, of course, will be in exactly the same state, good only in its bare bones form.
Still using 6
If you install your D6 correctly, you should have no problem upgrading when it is absolutely necessary.
As of right now, I am still using 6 for many sites. 7 is getting more mods everyday, but I find 6 to be quite a bit faster when it comes to working in the back-end. If you are managing a small business site you are likely using a server provider with limited processing allocation. If you have a dedicated server, I see no reason to not embrace 7, however.
We are only building in 7
We are only building in 7 now. I think it's ready, but the main thing is to make sure there are modules available in 7 that will do what you need them to do.
2 important things
From my point of view there is one reason to not upgrade everything on D7 and it is the high memory requirements that not every host can guarantee for an affordable price,
From the other side there is one reason you should upgrade as soon as you can and it's jQuery that is Very very very very very very old on Drupal 6. (1.3.2 with jQuery update).
At the moment these are my reasons to chose a newer or an older version.
high memory requirements
high memory requirements would be a concern for me. Currently I am just at the stage of comparing the contributed modules I need in D6 with the ones available in D7.
Anyone who gives another a cold cup of water certainly will not lose his reward!
Importing data
D7 Looks good but can't tell in depth. I'm trying D7 with Feeds to import the data from diff sources, RSS and also CSV and it gives me several problems going on and off. I could say the problem is related to the modules but when I enabled OTHER modules, sometimes D7 responds with errors
(BTW the locale and translations are not working despite following all the instructions, D6 worked like a charm)
Yesterday was kinda fine, acceptable, but D7 reported a new CORE, so I updated. Today I'm unable to import anything, I trired reinstalling from scratch but now it just doesn't work (not even with errors), the only difference was the D7 version (.12 vs .14).
I really like D7, hope things work out in the future. Unfortunately repeating the SAME steps is not giving me any results, the only difference as I said was the update, and the fresh install of the same version... Unfortunately I'm not starting a site from zero but trying to move all my data from other CMS (7K pages).
I am sorry for you!
A year ago I moved an old OSCommerce 2 website to Drupal 6. Drupal 7 had just been released and I thought for a second about skipping Drupal 6 but all the modules that I needed were not available for Drupal 7 yet. The old OSCommerce website had 1600 products listed.
OSCommerce was no picnic but I knew my way around it. The reason that drove me to move to Drupal was the security wholes on OSCommerce and the terrible processes that I would have to go through in order to upgrade to OSCommerce 3.
I did it all by myself from learning Drupal, to importing all the data, to creating a new theme from scratch. It was a nightmare that lasted 8 months! Well, I had to work 60 hours per week. Sleepless nights... I gained 25 pounds...
I am doing better now...
I am really sorry for you. I know what awaits you.
Of-course the latest version.
Of-course the latest version. that Drupal 7. otherwise your website will have security holes and lots of errors as your hosting company upgrade its Php and MySQL.
Sorry, that I have to say it.
Drupal 7 is by far not ready and stable enough,
to have a good reason,
to switch from the stable version 6, to still not ready version 7.
I have installed Drupal 7 on several occasions,
and I am still not satisfied.
Drupal 7 is very stable and
Drupal 7 is very stable and is working fine for me and many others.
_
maybe so... but over 400k others are (d7 reported usage is almost double that of d6) so your 'not ready or stable enough' assertion fails the sniff test.
opinion is one thing... facts are another.
.
I think we need to re-title this "Some people haven't been able to make the switch to D7 for whatever reason and have decided this means that it is unusable for everyone and feel the need to make sure everyone knows this."
That or just stop beating the poor dead horse and lock it. *shrug*
D6 vs D7 Modules and Features
While D7 core includes features of CCK and Image and many modules are available for both, I find that there are many excellent modules developed for D6 that have no upgraded D7 versions yet - Captcha for starters.
Also, from what I understand, once Drupal 8 is released, support for 6 ie core security updates wont be priority so if you are new Drupal 7 is likely best choice.
_
just an fyi-- it's not that d6 update won't be a priority-- there won't be any. It will go unsupported.
i read few article on blogs
i read few article on blogs outside,, many others people say that drupal 7 is like win vista :) ,, but i think drupal 7 is better
regards,
Drupal 7
It is time for Drupal 7.
As of Jan 2013, there are three times as many sites on Drupal 7 as on Drupal 6.
Re: Drupal 7
I agree that there are far more sites that have moved on to D7 including myself, however there are some issues with flip-array that remains rather buggy from time to time, but in some ways D7 is better than 6 and then again 6 was better than 5 for me. It is mostly subjective however I do like D8's admin menu-bar for sure.
still stable
the newest is good, but if the old one is still stable why have to move.
At this point Drupal 6 is
At this point Drupal 6 is nearing end of its support cycle.
Not for long
When the final version of Drupal 8 is released, Drupal 6 will not be supported anymore. And modules aren't really developed anymore for Drupal 6. So more the reason to upgrade to Drupal 7.
We build exclusively in D7
We build exclusively in D7 now for Drupal deployments. There are still a couple of holes in the module availability, but these seem to be for more niche issues which often have a different way of solving for D7. For example a particular user export module which was available in D6 and not for D7 can now be achieved through a few minutes work in Views.