Chris Blackwell’s Domain

Drupal 6 has been out for a little over a month now and I just finished converting the Xray Sierra website to it. On the surface it looks very similar to Drupal 5 but there are some great new features that I love and important improvements that will build the way to Drupal 7.

Upgrading Drupal

Upgrading from Drupal 5.x is relatively easy and I didn’t have any major problems that I found. You first must uninstall all themes and modules and then put the site in off-line mode. You can not upgrade from Drupal 4.x to Drupal 6. You must first upgrade to version 5 and then to 6. Most modules are not yet compatible with Drupal 6 and that will hold a lot of people back for a while.

OpenID Now Included

The inclusion of the OpenID module is a great victory for the OpenID community. I have been a long supporter of OpenID and I am very glad that Drupal has decided to include it with their list of core modules. OpenID is not activated by default and must be turned on by navigating to Site Building => Modules, then checking the box next to OpenID and saving the new settings.

Should I upgrade now?

I found the upgrade relatively easy. There were a few problems with the existing template I had on my Drupal site, but only because the new theme engine has changed a little. The extensions were a big issue as many of the most popular extensions have not been upgraded to support Drupal 6 as of yet. If you are an early adopter and love have the latest version installed on everything, then by all means go ahead. You will find Drupal 6 to be quite useful and stable, but extension-less.