Another weekend with Drupal 6

Yesterday evening, I spent about two hours updating my site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 RC 4 for another weekend test at my site. About 30 minutes was spent backing up the site and installing Drupal 6. The rest of my time was spent with tweaking things via Drupal's admin menus as well as looking at the contributed modules and themes available for D6. I'm currently using the Salamander theme and only two contributed modules, Image and CAPTCHA. I also spent some time placing snippets of PHP code in my blocks to replace many of the functions I was doing with Views. The end result is that with only two hours of work, I am just fine running CMSReport.com on Drupal 6

As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity. I'm convinced that most people do not have to wait for Views to move onto Drupal 6. Views only automated a number of SQL tasks that can easily be done with PHP. Some Drupal users are going to object when I say it is "easy" because they are not PHP developers, but you know what, I'm not a PHP developer either. In fact, I'm kind of slow, but I seem to manage along just fine with D6.

As usual during this period of the development process, people are wondering if the new version of Drupal is ready to be released or if there will be another release candidate. Whether this is the last release candidate or not for Drupal 6 I'm not sure anyone can really say. All I will say is Drupal 6 feels ready to me.

Updated: 1:56 PM CST February 10, 2008
Really no issues to report with this install of Drupal 5. I have seen some issues though with 5.x contributed modules removed from prior to the install, not fully properly uninstalling. See this in the forms of links in the menus, admin menus, and referenced in some other place. Luckily the contributed modules are getting better all the time. For example, the developer of the adsense module just improved the uninstall in a new version of the adsense module. What perfect timing!

Updated: 1:56 PM CST February 10, 2008
CMS Report is back on Drupal 5 (and also on a new server). It's actually more work transferring the posts/comments from the Drupal 6 install back to Drupal 5 site. I think this will likely by my last test with expectations in the next two week that my next upgrade to D6 will be permanent. Hooray for Drupal.