Drupal 6 is Dead

(A Developers Perspective)
By Grady Wring

Now that Drupal 6 has been officially declared dead by the community at large, there are thousands of people worldwide trying to make the decision about which version to choose, Drupal 7 (D7) or Drupal 8 (D8). I have experience as a developer with both versions and I think that for most applications, there’s only one choice in mind, and that is Drupal 8.

1.    More in Core Than Ever Before
The advancements in functionality from D6 to D7 were fantastic, but D8 just made the jump to lightspeed. All of the mission-critical, community-contributed modules for D7 have been fully integrated in D8. Views, WYSIWYG, multilingual support, and tons of other features are now completely integrated pieces out of the box.

2.    Object-Oriented Goodness Baked Right In
You’re not a programmer. I get it. So, here is what ‘Object-Oriented’ means for you: D8 has been completely rewritten from the ground up. It has been rethought, redesigned, and completely modernized. D8 is a state-of-the-art system that is even more modular than any previous Drupal version.

Object-Oriented code means that system maintainability is improved on every level. This means we can replace entire modules. No big deal. We could always do that, but we can now replace individual chunks of code without potentially harming the entire system. This makes D8 more robust, reliable, and sustainable. For the first time Drupal delivers on the promise of a completely modular website.
 
3.    The Need for Speed
The best way to get high performance from a Drupal site is to cache everything. This means that when a visitor loads a page, the page content is stored for a period of time and the next visitor that loads the page is given the stored version rather than all of the content having to be reloaded. Caching dramatically reduces page load times.

Drupal’s page caching in D6 was alright. D7’s page caching was better. Like everything else in D8 though, caching has been revolutionized. Page caching is gone. Instead, every single thing on a page is now independently cacheable. Not only that, but caching for a specific period of time has been replaced by a dynamically aware caching system that just magically knows when caches need to be updated.

The big advantage here is that when something on a page needs to be re-cached, only that piece gets re-cached. The rest of the page is still in storage. The bottom line to all of this is that D8 is significantly and more-consistently faster than any previous version of Drupal. And that is the definition of burying the lead. 

So, Is D7 Still a Thing?
Absolutely. D7 is alive and kicking. While D8 has huge advantages over D7, there are still some reasons why we would choose D7 over D8 in certain circumstances. If you’re unsure which to choose, it’s okay. Just give Cool Blue a call and we will guide you towards the right fit.