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about the author
Jon Mears is from the North East of England and has been building websites for nearly 15 years. He set up Creative Node in 2007 and specializes in producing content management solutions for all size businesses and public sector organisations.
A keen Sunderland AFC fan he regularly stuffered with the clubs form but now rather enjoys the clubs purple patch. Married with two children and has been known to throw some crazy shapes and spin the odd record here and there.
When is the right time to use Drupal 7?
I'm doing a bit of R&D for a possible project that might swing my way and the first question I asked myself was; "do I go with Drupal 6 or plunge headlong into Drupal 7?" I havent had much exposure to Drupal 7 mainly due to the code base of my existing builds being Drupal 6, I couldn't dismiss 7 out of hand, so a bit of digging was required.
I knew a little from the brief that it was going to have custom content types and require some image manipulation, these two would be no problem in D7 as both the brilliant ImageCache and (some of) Content Construction Kit is now built into the Drupal Core.
Things were looking favourably to Drupal 7. Excellent!
Then the deal breaker, import 300+ entries into a custom content type. If Node Import had been ported to Drupal 7 we would have a winner and I could have happily download the latest shiney version and got cracking. But, shock! horror! Node Import doesn't have a Drupal 7 version not even one in beta. There does look like some light at the end of the tunnel with this post http://drupal.org/node/819602, but I kinda need it now so Drupal 6 it will be.
The problem with Drupal 7 is that it's still new, only a couple of months (if that) since full release, and the array of modules just isnt there yet, that why I'll be sticking with Drupal 6 for the next 6 months at least. I'll get flamed for this (probably) but at the end of the day if my clients request Drupal 7 (they probably know enough to do the site themselves!) I'll have to warn them that where modules don't exist I'll have write similar functionality and that will impact on cost and development time and untimately their return on investment.