Hey folks!
We are starting to play around with drupal for building our church website. We have downloaded and installed the latest drupal (6.2). One concern we have is that there doesn't seem to be a calendar solution for 6.x yet. We are just looking for something simple like the calendar on the St. Matthews site. My questions are:
- Am I confused? Is there a 6.x calendar solution available? Is 6.x too new to use yet? Should we be using 5.x?
- I see discussion about the event module vs. CCK/View/Date+Calendar. Looks like CCK/View w/Date+Calendar is the way to go...do you agree...is there consensus on this within the Drupal community?
- I see that Calendar and Date have good handbooks detailing how to set things up but again doesn't seem to be updated for 6.x...=8(
What do you think?
ptb
wait.
I think your best bet would be to wait, or to use Drupal5.
Views hasn't been released for 6 yet as far as I know, and Event is in development, so, for anything else than a test site, I think ^ would be too unstable, unsupported, and not up-to-date in terms of modules.
You could either wait for more modules to be converted to Drupal 6, or, if in a hurry, stick with 5.x
Paul Vaartjes
www.paulvaartjes.com
www.cursoryglance.wordpress.co...
I Agree
I'd use drupal 5 or hold off for a little bit. A number of key modules are still being upgraded to work with drupal 6.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
The Drupal 6 Waiting Game
I've been playing the waiting game for D6 myself, but just this morning I heard some interesting news on the latest Lullabot podcast. It sounds like Views2 is getting very close to a beta candidate, and CCK is right there with it. Those two are the biggest reason I haven't even started looking at D6 yet, but it sounds like I might be able to download the latest builds and start playing around with it.
The Lullabots anticipate that "everything will be back to normal" in just a few weeks, and they said that if you're releasing in three months, start planning with Drupal 6, because within six months from now, everyone's focus will be off of Drupal 5. I think that might be an overstatement, but D6 may soon be in my plans that have longer timelines.
They also talked about how the shift towards Views and CCK is sending some modules (like the Event module) on their way out. I think there's some validity to that. I've already had to backtrack a couple of sites that were built with pre-CCK modules.
I recently built a Drupal wireframe based on our existing church web site, and I did all the front-page event stuff with CCK. I don't think I'll want to bother with Event module for this in production, whether I do it in D6 or stick with D5.
<rant>Sorry, but I shudder every time I hear talk about D7. Migration to Drupal 6 is being held up by essential modules, yet core development keeps crashing forward. Yes, it's the right direction, but I'm afraid a lot of current D5 sites are going to get left in the dust. Switching to a CMS is supposed to make site maintenance easier. (This is why I finally switched away from Fedora for Linux; I wanted to keep getting security updates without constantly upgrading all of my servers!) This gets compounded when off-the-shelf contrib modules get dropped. It's great to build new sites with better tools, but maintaining established sites can become a nightmare.</rant>
Ok, sorry, this is probably the wrong thread for that, but I had to get it off my chest. CCK rocks, and it sounds like Views2 is going to be amazingly cool. Combined, they should give us way more flexibility than older monolithic modules like Image and Event ever did, so it's all good. And I suppose with modules like Node Convert migration from wrong guesses might not be too painful, either.
Micah
(edited to add: Views 2.0 Beta 1 released yesterday)
Thanks for all the good info!
Thanks (all) very much for the feedback!!! We have decided to stay with D6 basically because we are already a ways down the path with it. We are learning drupal as we go and have already played around a bunch with D6 so we are going to work with it as it comes along.
Also, I'm reading the Drupal Cookbook for Beginners right now and they recommend (actually quoting someone else I think) that "Stay away from Views, Category, CCK...until you at least have a little experience under your belt.", so I think when we are ready for it, it will be at a place where we can use it.
It just wasn't clear, and maybe I missed it, on the Drupal site that D6 was not necessarily the right starting point at the time we went to download it.
Thanks so much for the comments about D7...I was shuddering as well...glad I'm not alone!
You folks all ROCK!!!
ptb