Drupal 4.7 or Drupal 5
Mon, 2006-12-18 21:01 — Kevin Reynen
Last week Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of Drupal 5 was released. The core Drupal development team made some HUGE improvements in the organization of the administration tools dividing them between Content management, Site building, Site configuration, and User management.
By the end of the week, I have to choose between Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5 to build a site that will beta in January and go live to the public in February. I'm looking for feedback on the age old question of going with the known, stable framework or the exciting, new framework. Since the task of maintaining content and users is going to fall on the cohort of grad students studying interactive journalism, the improvements to the admin interfaces should reduce the amount of help the faculty and students need from me to run their site.
Drupal 5 includes JQuery, making it easier for developers to add AJAX functionality like Netflix-esque Fivestar module.
Michelle Cox has posted timeline for updating the popular 4.7 modules to work with Drupal 5. Notice the number of modules marked "Not started until after RC". The question I have to answer this week is, how long will it take to update the modules I absolutely need to work with 5? Are the improvements in Drupal 5 worth waiting for module developers to update their code... or taking on the burden of updating the module myself?
Status of modules I used in 4.7 installs:
- Flash Gallery -
Broken. No progress from developer in CVS.Patched. - Bio -
Broken. No progress from developer in CVS. - TinyMCE -
Broken. No progress from developer in CVS.Patched, but could be replaced by FCKEditor - Gallery 2 - Might work, but no really necessary if the exif.module worked with the basic image.module. Gallery 2's additional interface was really overkill for most needs.
- GMap -
Broken. No progress from developer in CVS.Patch in progess from several developers - Event - Broken. No progress from developer in CVS. Use Profile and Views?
- Mailhandler - Broken. No progress from developer in CVS.
- Tagagelic - Updated by Ryan Szrama.
- XML Sitemap -
Broken. No progress from developer in CVS.Andrew Morton Patched 12/14/06 - LDAP - Patched.
New Drupal 5 modules with functionality I want:
Comments
Alternative Admin Interfaces for 4.7
Drupal 5 should go gold within a few months, but like you said, many modules that we developers lean on tend to lag behind. Such is the nature of the open source community driven beast. It seems like you are still going to require a number of modules that don't seem to have gotten started on upgrading yet, so your best bet might be to stick with 4.7 for now and upgrade later if necessary.
As for cleaning up the admin interfaces, there has been some work done for 4.7 to do this, such as with the Administration module (http://drupal.org/project/administration) which, while still a little buggy sometimes, works pretty well all things considered and does pretty good job of reorganizing the admin panels into logical groupings. When I played around with this, I found the new look very nice, though perhaps because I am so used to the old 'structure' of the admin interface I ended up reverting back to the standard because I had no other users to consider.
Brian
Drupal.org going RC1
According to this...
http://drupal.org/drupal-5.0-rc1
"We plan to upgrade Drupal.org to Drupal 5 RC1 somewhere during the next couple of weeks."
JQuery in 4.7?
Here's a page suggesting JQuery is available in 4.7:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/1781
Reverse engineering the Drupal 5 modules?
Given that I don't have time to write a CMS from scratch, I have to build on what other people have done. My guess is it took the core Drupal team more time to develop the new admin interface than it would take me to port the 4.7 modules I want to the 5 framework. JQuery is never going to be added to 4.7 and it's going to take more than just JQuery to get a 5 module working in 4.7.
It's the improved admin interfaces that I'm really interested in. The JQuery functionality is just icing.