Drupal 6 has been in the wild for about a year now, and Drupal 7 is on the way. This article will take a look at Drupal 6 from the point of view of a Drupal 5 user, especially with regards to whether it makes sense to update your Drupal 5 site to Drupal 6.
First, we can take a look at the new features that have been included in the Drupal 6 release. One of the major features is a new installer to aid the technically challenged in setting up their Drupal website, which could be a difficult task with Drupal 5. The installer can now check for “Clean Url” support (which the vast majority of website administers will want to take advantage of), and enable this feature if the support is available. The installer also sets the “Files” directory during installation, and multi-language support is available from the outset.
Another improvement is the drag-and-drop administration that has taken the place of the unwieldy weighting system that was used throughout Drupal 5. This interface is available for menu items, forums, taxonomy terms, uploaded files, input formats, profile fields and more.
Other improvements include an updated theming system to improve the ease of custom theming, password strength checking, granular permissions and other small changes.
Drupal 6 also boasts several new core modules, including OpenID, Update Status and Actions plus Triggers. All of these, however, are contributed modules that were available for Drupal 5, so this is not a major improvement.
One of the features touted in the release notes for Drupal 6 is optimized code that “improves performance for both authenticated and anonymous users”. However, several benchmark tests have concluded that Drupal 5 is consistently faster that Drupal 6, using core modules only. This may be a strong consideration for those considering upgrading to Drupal 6, especially since Drupal 5 is not the most efficient beast itself.
2bits.com Drupal 5 vs. 6 Comparison
Vision Media Benchmark Testing
2bits.com Drupal Getting Slower Article
Upgrade Considerations
Now that we have taken a look at the new features of Drupal 6, let’s look at whether it makes sense to update your Drupal 5.x website to Drupal 6. This choice will depend entirely upon what sort of website you are running with Drupal 5. If you have a simple website with a small number of contributed modules, then upgrading may be an easy task. If you have a more complex website with a larger number of contributed modules and customizations then upgrading starts to become more daunting.
Not only will you have to update Drupal core, you will also need to update each of the contributed modules that you are using. This task is made more difficult by the fact that there may not be a Drupal 6 compatible version of each of your web site's modules. Even if the module has a 6.x compatible version, that version may not be as stable as the 5.x version. This necessitates the extra step of checking the issue queue on Drupal.org for the 6.x version of each module to ensure that people aren’t having problems with the module on the 6.x branch.
Given that updating your Drupal 5 site may prove to be difficult, does the new feature set necessitate an upgrade? From the point of view of a Drupal 5 user (myself), there are no “must-have” features in the Drupal 6 release that would balance out the difficulty of an upgrade. The drag-and-drop interface is the one feature that sticks out as an important, probably due to the fact that the old weighting system was so cumbersome.
Conclusions
Drupal 6 is an incremental improvement over Drupal 5. Although the new feature set is fairly large, the difficulty of upgrading your Drupal 5 site overwhelms any small improvements that you may get by performing the update. In addition, if you have a Drupal 5 site with a custom theme you may want to take a very close look at the theming changes before even considering an upgrade.
If you don’t currently have a Drupal 5 website, then you will want to start with Drupal 6, as it does seem to be an improvement over the previous version. The only reason not to use Drupal 6 for a brand new website would be if a module you need exists for Drupal 5 only, and has not been ported to 6. This issue may well occur – there are 75 pages of contributed modules for Drupal 5, and only 46 for Drupal 6.
