Update - As of mid April, we are on our 3rd build in Drupal 7. With a release of views 7.x-3.0-beta3 and more modules and themes coming online like Zen 7.x-3.0 it's a good time to look seriously at building in D7. We have our first Drupal 7 e-commerce site coming up soon so we will keep you posted about any issues we have with drupal commerce integration.
If you are a Drupal developer or looking to use Drupal to build you may have heard that Drupal 7 (D7), has been released.
We are getting quite a few customers asking if they should have their site built using D7 so what's the answer - in short probably not.
Firstly it's worth taking a second to explain how the Drupal major versions are released and what it all means. Drupal is an open source project which means that it is maintained, developed and improved by the community. I'll come to why this is a factor in a moment.
When a new major version of Drupal core is released support is dropped for the previous version minus 1. Therefore when D7 came out on January 5th, 2011 which means that on that day Druapl 5 was officially unsupported.
Oh no... what does that mean to all the Drupal 5 sites? - will they stop working? will they instantly be compromised? - of course not.
As I mentioned earlier Drupal is an open source project and there is a security team which looks after each supported Drupal version - what this means is that they actively look for bugs and fixes in Drupal core and contributed modules (or at least post warnings about contributed modules).
When support is dropped the security team stops working on it but it doesn't mean that there are bound to be security issues - you would like to hope that by now all of the main security issues have been addressed in Drupal 5. These sites will continue to run just as they did on January 4th.
One thing that you might notice however is that module developers stop adding features to older versions of their modules - after all, most of them are doing this in their spare time and probably don't want to support 3 versions of their module.
Drupal release schedules
It's also worth looking at the Drupal release cycle.
Drupal 6 was released on 18th February, 2008. This means that D4 became unsupported on that date. From this you can see that there was almost a 2 year gap before D7 came out meaning that in theory D8 will be released on or around 1st Jan 2013.
I actually think it will be less than 2 years for one reason or another but it does mean that Drupal 6 will have a lifespan of around 3 to 4 years, and if you really think that you can have the same site or similar site for 4 years then you probably need to re-evaluate your business strategy.
Yes - sites can be upgraded and have functionality added but in my opinion you should factor in a major site upgrade every 2 years.
So should I build in D7?
Our advice is that if you have a relatively simple site, maybe a brochureware site or something similar that does not require e-commerce then you may be able to use D7. Some of the major contributed modules like views are still not fully released for D7 although we have used views in D7 and it seems pretty stable.
What about upgrading?
If you have a Drupal 5 site then it might be worth looking at depending on your upgrade path. It's worth noting that the accepted truth is that your data is always upgradable - your site however may not be. It's not just a simple click, click, pop to upgrade a site to a new Drupal version. I sometimes get rather annoyed that people think they have been sold a lemon when they hear they will have to pay to upgrade a Drupal site.
You wouldn't go to your car dealership and moan that they can't upgrade your 2008 Honda Civic to the new model - maybe that's a bad analogy!
At Drupalise IT, we always make the point to our customers that there will come a time when they may have to upgrade and that will incur a cost.
I think people have to appreciate how fast the web is moving and to keep up with it you have to re-factor code, add new features drop old ones. I don't think there is a CMS technology out there that has seamless upgrades between major versions and if there was it might end up like MS windows where there is so much baggage with a release that it becomes slow and cumbersome.
