upgrades

One of the most common questions that I get asked is why we are developing Aegir on Drupal 5. People who have been involved with the project for a while already know the answer, but I thought I'd post this executive summary.

Due to it's design, the Aegir system is fully capable of installing and managing Drupal 5, Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 sites, including managing upgrades of sites between all those versions. Only the front end (namely the hosting module, hostmaster install profile and now, the eldir theme) is Drupal 5 based.

A bunch of us themers at DrupalCon Barcelona decided that we really ought to revive this group!

On that note... Merlin gave a great presentation on the exciting new things happening in themes for Drupal 6, including subthemes, info files, MUCH better separation of logic and presentation, and more template files throughout Drupal. Here's a more thorough description of what's changed for theming in 6: http://drupal.org/node/132442

We're getting a lot closer to that point where CSS/HTML gurus don't have to be PHP whizzes in order to create great themes.

For us (an end user who occasionaly develops for others) the concept of a six monthly update that does not have backward compatiblity is one of the biggest worries in using Drupal. While I understand the ideal and applaud it, it does bring up the issue of leverage in regard to the financial investment made.

We want to see a return on any investment we make so having to start an upgrade cycle every six months if going to be very hard to justify especially as the size of our sites mean that we are going to be constantly programming to stay still. Our most recent project has had over 400 man days in development and uses a huge number of contributed modules to update to V5 is going to be a major task.