The community of Drupal developers is constantly working to improve the Drupal platform. The first major update of these improvements in a couple years is Drupal 7, which will most likely be released in the next couple of months. (The core Drupal development team prefers to not set a release date but instead to release it when all critical bugs have been resolved. If you are a PHP developer who can smash bugs, you can help get Drupal 7.0 released sooner.) There are many improvements to Drupal with Drupal 7, but the decision to upgrade at this point should not be taken lightly.

How does upgrading to Drupal 7 Help My Website?

An upgrade to Drupal 7 improves the future of your website. Updates to the administration of Drupal 7 are the result of hours and hours in professional software testing labs making sure administration is more usable and straightforward. Also, newer database systems mean you can run your Drupal site on different types of database setups to better fit your business needs. And major updates to different portions of the module and themeing systems mean smoother, quicker and more flexible custom module development for your Drupal site.

What should I consider when upgrading?

There are a lot of details to consider when upgrading your Drupal site. In fact, for many sites, the process of upgrading may involve completely reworking how the site is structured and managed. When Drupal 7 is released, all core functionality will have a working upgrade path. However, the majority of current sites use some community-contributed Drupal modules to complete their functionality. Most of the major contributed modules do have a version that will work for Drupal 7, but not all do. And not all Drupal 7 modules will have a smooth upgrade path from earlier versions of Drupal. Similarly, all custom modules for the site will require at least a minor rewrite due to changes in the database and themeing systems within Drupal 7.

It may be a little early to start the Drupal 7 upgrade process, but it’s not too early to start thinking about when and what is involved in upgrading your site. It will be at least a couple months before August Ash starts using Drupal 7 for new production sites; we have to evaluate Drupal 7 further to make sure it meets our needs. If you are looking to update and improve your website in major ways over the next couple years, an upgrade to Drupal 7 within the next six months would be recommended. If you want to keep your website much the same for the next couple years, there is much less reason to upgrade. As with any web site change or upgrade, the answer to the question for you comes down to cost. Is it worth it for you?

Contact us at August Ash to find out how much a Drupal website upgrade may cost for your site.

Creating a website with a content management system in today’s web world is almost a necessity. In the web of yesteryear, we used to make sites like we make brochures; if we need to include some new information, we open up the file and change it and then upload it to the website. Content Management Systems such as Drupal or WordPress save us the hassle of finding files, copying them, and uploading them. (more…)

It’s been said that a professional is only as good as his/her tools. While we think there’s more to success than just the tools at hand, there’s a lot of merit to that old saying.

With that in mind, August Ash, a Minneapolis web design firm, has surrounded itself with a mixture of trusted, dependable, and versatile tools. Among them is Drupal, a website content management system (CMS).
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