David's Tech Blog

I have quite a bit of experience using Drupal, at this point more than with any other CMS platform. In the past I’ve run a variety of others, but by a good margin most of my development on these types of things has been on Drupal. I’ve written several modules for Drupal 4.7 and 5.  Of course, I’ve also developed a number of apps and sites that were built from scratch, or on my own code base, or on miscellaneous other products that someone else implemented and then I got to fix, but those are a different issue altogether.

I have been facing the release of Drupal 6 with some trepidation. I have a number of deployed Drupal 5 modules out there (I think all of the 4.7 sites that use my modules have been updated by now), and the job of updating the modules is daunting. There needs to be a pretty compelling reason, I think, to update them, considering the amount of work that is going to be required.

I should probably say that none of these modules are released publicly. They were all to solve specific business needs, mostly of my primary employer (Food for the Hungry). Updating the modules would mean updating the private sites that use them to Drupal 6 as well.

Now that Drupal 6 has been released, I don’t see any compelling reason to bother. Yes, Drupal 6 has a number of very good improvements. Its a good product, and they are continuing to take it in a very promising direction. But the improvements for an established site don’t rise to any huge reason to spend significant time updating these sites. And it would take quite a bit of effort, since the changes are considerable.

I also considered moving this blog back to Drupal, since that is the software on which I base so much of my ongoing work. There is little chance that my development work will stop emphasizing Drupal. However, Drupal does not do anything like the nice job on basic blogs that WordPress does. I guess that’s partly a difference between a more generalized content system (and for me framework for business process automation oriented modules) and a more specialized blogging package like WordPress. I’m fairly confident I would not try to do the things with WordPress that I can do with Drupal. On the other hand, for a basic blog, WordPress is much nicer.