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The upgrade situation with Drupal is, frankly, a disaster. Every major revision from 6->7->8, breaks literally every module and every third party piece of code.

The upgrade situation with Drupal is, frankly, a disaster. Every major revision from 6->7->8, breaks literally every module and every third party piece of code. I'm months into migrating our website from 6 to 7 (I'm the only person working on the migration, and my PHP experience is somewhat limited). Many common modules provide no usable upgrade path, even if there is a version for both 6 and 7 (which is often not the case). And, there seems to be no inclination on the part of Drupal core developers to alter this course, or even recognition that it's a horrible user experience. According to some conversations I've had with folks, Drupal 8 seems to be even worse than Drupal 7, and Drupal 7 is literally the worst upgrade experience I've ever had. Piles of new jargon and new APIs get introduced in every new release, and often replaces or subsumes entire swaths of similar functionality in previous releases (e.g. nodes -> entities), and Drupal was already ridiculously jargon-heavy to the point of documentation making no sense to someone without extensive experience with the specific ways they use terminology, and googling generic terms like "node" and "entity" is a laughably unhelpful process. I have, at many points in this process, thought: "Fuck everything about this, I'm migrating to WordPress." I probably should have done so the first time I thought that, as it would be done by now. But, every time I made it over another hump in the upgrade, I thought, "Surely that was the worst of it." and kept slogging along. Upgrading WordPress is literally a no-brainer, now...you just get emails every week or two saying, "Your website has been updated to the latest version of WordPress." Sometimes, you click the "upgrade database" button. Sorry to rant. But, I happen to be working on my Drupal upgrade again today, so I'm grumpy.

BillyParadise 11y ago
Software brings out the best in people :) (now if I can get this damned rails gem to work properly....)
johnatwork 11y ago
The biggest gripe I've had with Drupal was when moving from 6 to 7, they had module writers pledge that their modules would be ready on the release day of 7, which a lot of folks broke the promise or worse, abandoned the project all together without letting anyone know. So some folks were caught not being able to upgrade due to a crucial module being abandoned at 6.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  I have that problem, as well. But, the biggest problem I have is that even when there was a pledge to do so and when they actually eventually produced a D7 module (Drupal 7 is several years old...I spent most of this time waiting for the modules we rely on to become stable on Drupal 7), there wasn't a pledge to provide an upgrade path...so, you've got data in some module in Drupal 6, and no way to get that data into the same module in Drupal 7. Often there are bizarre workarounds, like using the Migrate module, which is designed to handle all sorts of migration tasks and is thus endlessly complex, and requires custom migration code (and comprehension of a huge swath of even more new jargon and convoluted, baroque, APIs). It begins to remind me of Zope/Plone from many years ago, which had many of the same problems. Lots of jargon, lots of new ideas in each version before the old ideas were stable or fully implemented, painful upgrades, tight coupling of interfaces making changes in one part of the system require changes in every part of the system. A modular system is nearly meaningless, if every module has to be rewritten with every new release.

BillyParadise 11y ago

Software brings out the best in people :) (now if I can get this damned rails gem to work properly....)

johnatwork 11y ago

The biggest gripe I've had with Drupal was when moving from 6 to 7, they had module writers pledge that their modules would be ready on the release day of 7, which a lot of folks broke the promise or worse, abandoned the project all together without letting anyone know. So some folks were caught not being able to upgrade due to a crucial module being abandoned at 6.

SwellJoe 11y ago
I have that problem, as well. But, the biggest problem I have is that even when there was a pledge to do so and when they actually eventually produced a D7 module (Drupal 7 is several years old...I spent most of this time waiting for the modules we rely on to become stable on Drupal 7), there wasn't a pledge to provide an upgrade path...so, you've got data in some module in Drupal 6, and no way to get that data into the same module in Drupal 7. Often there are bizarre workarounds, like using the Migrate module, which is designed to handle all sorts of migration tasks and is thus endlessly complex, and requires custom migration code (and comprehension of a huge swath of even more new jargon and convoluted, baroque, APIs). It begins to remind me of Zope/Plone from many years ago, which had many of the same problems. Lots of jargon, lots of new ideas in each version before the old ideas were stable or fully implemented, painful upgrades, tight coupling of interfaces making changes in one part of the system require changes in every part of the system. A modular system is nearly meaningless, if every module has to be rewritten with every new release.