Drupal Development, Version 5 vs. 6 - Drupal 6 Still Not Quite Ready for Production Sites

We try to keep a fairly close eye on the ongoing development of Drupal - for a number of reasons. Most importantly, we think Drupal is the best CMS (content management system) and probably the best open source project period, hands down, "not a real contest". So, yes, we're Drupal fans.

But another reason is to determine if and when we might want to move to Drupal 6 for production websites. Currently, we only use Drupal 6 for development and testing, or if we happen to work on a website that has already been done in Drupal 6. Otherwise, we use the latest version of Drupal 5. And while the continuing development of Drupal 6 is admirable and many great things have been done to Drupal, our conclusion is that for now, Drupal 6 is really not quite ready for production sites.

Despite all of the pluses that could be listed in a pros and cons list, one of the main issues for us is that Drupal 6 still not efficient enough - basically its still a bit too slow. Yes, plenty can be done to make it faster - such as modifying the enormous number of checks Drupal does (is this module outdated? is this the latest version? etc. etc.), but really this shouldn't be necessary. Developing a site in Drupal 6 shouldn't require spending time trying to make it as fast as Drupal 5. This should only be a concern, if necessary, when a website gets far more traffic than planned - and perhaps a client is trying to make shared web hosting do more than most can do (i.e. avoid dedicated servers, etc.).

Of course, we'll going to keep an eye on Drupal development and we expect to see even more great things. But for now, we'll stick to Drupal 5.x, easily one of the best open source platforms on the planet.

Updated: Using Drupal 6 for Production Sites - we made the move to Drupal 6 some time ago.