The WGBH.org Development Blog

As we finally get down to coding the new WGBH.org we are all of a sudden faced with another big decision. Namely should we go with Drupal 5 or Drupal 6, which was officially released earlier this week.

At first this seemed like an easy choice. Drupal 5 is the reliable old standard now (relatively speaking), with lots and lots of nifty modules already in place and working. Plus, Drupal 5 is what we’ve been planning on and working with already. Why switch to a brand new release just as we’re finally getting the build off the ground? Doesn’t seem prudent…

But Drupal 6 sure does look sexy.

I just checked out the D6 upgrade status of the modules we’re already planning to use for phase 1 of our rebuild and here’s what I found:

• CCK - In Progress
• Date - Unknown
• FeedAPI - Unknown
• Image - Done!
• Image Assist - Unknown
• Javascript Tools = Unknown
• Pathauto - Done!
• Update Status - Now in core!
• Views - In Progress

If you have any additional or updated information on the status of these modules, let us know!

So, even assuming that Views and CCK are upgraded soon, there are some big holes here, most glaringly FeedAPI, which we’ll use to fetch and parse our TV program and schedule data from PBS. Plus, we will obviously have need for a variety of other modules along the way and who knows what those are and whether they’ll be upgraded any time soon. Clearly, we should just stick with Drupal 5, right?

But, dang, Drupal 6 sure does look sexy.

I mean, it’s got drag and drop administration, lots of theming improvements, more granular permissions and lots of performance and scalability improvements.

Hmmm…

Well, fortunately, I can table the decision for a bit. That’s because, while we’re already writing code, we have yet to build our official development environment. We’re getting a new server for development, on which we will have nice clean new installs of everything. For now, I am building on our old development server which has some issues. I figure once the new dev server is ready we can at that point review the module statuses and make the call then.

Hey, at least it’s nice to have choices!