Forums / Cotonti / Core Labs / Ideas / Feature requests for 1.x branch

#34492 Trustmaster:

Will Drupal 5/6 users find sufficient modules/plugins here?

Some will, some won't. My (now ex-) company and I have used Drupal for lots of things for ages. I have/we have also developed web sites back when you wrote HTML by hand (I even wrote one interactive site using awk) and have friends who seem to think Drupal is the solution for everything. I just wanted to say that up front so you get an idea where I am coming from.

Historically, Drupal 4 didn't do all that much fancy stuff which really started the huge "add a module" campaign. It was not uncommon for multiple modules to be introduced, by different people, to address a need. Some modules were just written to address one user's needs. As a Drupal 7 module is generally very different from a Drupal 4.7/5/6 module, folks in that boat are going to be re-writing anyway.

Those who picked more general-purpose modules (and I fall into the category with a couple of sites) picked wrong. That is, there were multiple choices (photo galleries is one common example) and pretty much whatever you picked was wrong because there is no such animal in Drupal 7 yet and what is getting designed is not a plug-in replacement. (I can explain this case in detail if anyone cares but it is really a significant design change that does more than just break backward compatability.)

There are lots of Drupal sites I know of which consist of some static pages, forums and, maybe, multi-user blogs. And not much more. For others, add photo galleries and tags and you have everything covered. As photo galleries and blogs are the most requested features here, having them should make cotonti a possible new home for people wanting something new.

I have three "more than trivial" sites running Drupal. All need some upgrades and Drupal is probably not the right solution for at least two of them.

• The most active is still running Drupal 5 and we have some serious issues. (It is seriously broken right now because of some hosting issues which has turned a "move when D7 does what we want" into a "gotta fix it now" issue. It is not a candidate for moving to cotonti because it has what Drupal calls books, a hierarchical set of pages which make up a lot of the site. Othen than that feature, cotonti with photo galleries and blogs would be a possible choice. (Today, ocportal feels like the best fit.)
• Another site is little more than a personal blog with comments running on Drupal 6. It also has a (not well maintained) set of web links. While it doesn't need to be updated, it would be an easy fit into cotonti. I did it in Drupal because, at the time, I was doing everything in Drupal. From others I know, this was not an uncommon approach.
• The third site started mostly as an experiment to test out some Drupal 7 features. It has a plan and a bit of content but, based on issues with Drupal 7, I am looking for a better platform. It is/will be a bunch of semi-static pages organized into at least what looks like a few hierarchies, forums and a glossary. Other than the glossary, which should be easy to implement, this would seem to be a good fit for cotonti.

I think what I have described is pretty typical. That is, people used Drupal to do something (which may of may not have needed some fancy stuff) and when they needed another site, they used the same tool. In general, this should have been the right approach. Unfortunately, so many D4/5/6 modules now leading to a dead end has made this an unwise decision.

Note that I a not trying to trash Drupal. Dries has done something pretty amazing and the big changes in Drupal 7 are going to be a good thing. The audience I am suggesting for conversion are those who got caught in this big change.