Does your organization need Drupal 7?

Drupal 6 vs Drupal 7

Last year was pretty exciting for Drupal developers when release 7 finally became stable enough to be called “Production Ready”.  A simpler user interface, the ability to install modules without having to jump out to the Linux file system, and the integration of the field content system known as CCK all contribute to make the core of Drupal 7 much more attractive than its predecessor, Drupa l 6.

But most of a web site’s functionality that is built with Drupal comes from contributed modules that enhance and extend the core product’s features.  If you were to rely on simply the core of Drupal to build a web-site, you might have some forms, a blog and perhaps a few static pages, but you wouldn’t have pictures or fancy drop-down menus to say the least of shopping carts and social network integration.  All of those latter features come from contributed modules that have been developed by folks outside of the core Drupal team.

As of early 2012, Drupal’s most popular modules have been adapted for use in in version 7.  Ubercart has been replaced with “Commerce”; the views module, responsible for manipulating the data from Drupal’s core content and user profiles is working splendidly, and hundreds of other modules are available, but there are still several other hundred modules which haven’t been fully modified or re-written to work in the new environment, and of the ones that have been brought forward to Drupal 7, many are without documentation at all, to say the least of ‘robust’ documentation.

Drupal 6 is the platform of choice for any small to medium sized organization to target as a development environment.  In 2008, Drupal 6 was released to the world, and for 4 years, thousands of web sites have been created for everything from the small florist shop on the corner of Main Street, to the Whitehouse in Washington.  Modules have withstood the test of use in the real world, and have been enhanced to address the thousands of bugs that unavoidably creep their way into software, and more modules continue to be enhanced and developed for the mature platform, and Drupal’s core also continues to be revisioned as security deficiencies are discovered.

If you plan on developing a website that contains advanced features, you may want to seriously consider the ramifications of choosing Drupal 7 over Drupal 6.  Can you afford the costs of underwriting a module’s development?  And if you can afford it, are you prepared to be patient enough to wait for its bugs to get ironed out enough so that it can be considered production ready?

Drupal 6 is a solid platform that is still preferred by many developers, even above other CMS systems like Wordpress and Joomla.  It has a solid and familiar methodology for development, and it has a development community that is very engaged in addressing issues with the modules that have been created for it.  If your website’s budget is under $10,000, you may want to seriously consider the advantages of staying on Drupal 6 until Drupal 7’s development efforts have matured further and become more robustly documented.

If you are a larger organization however, and you’ve determined that the features you are interested in having for your website are new to the marketplace, then Drupal 7 might be the direction for your team to go in.  But simply because release 7 is newer does not make Drupal 6 obsolete what so ever.