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Drupal 6 is Live!
Quick announcement that the latest version of Drupal is live. It’s the 6.0 release and is the most robust to-date. We use Drupal on CN and after working with some of the largest CMS packages over the past 12 years, I can tell you that Drupal is the best I’ve worked with. The flexibility is awesome and the admin makes life easy.
There are too many new features to list here so check out what Drupal calls the “easiest version ever”. One of the biggest new features is drag and drop site admin which is similar to the modules option in the latest WordPress version. There’s also an in-depth screencast of the new features.
The only downside to upgrading is that you must have 6.0 versions of every contributed module used on your site or there might be pieces of the site that are broken. I will post another note once we’ve upgraded.
One thing that is not credited enough is performance. Drupal is a database intensive webapp just like any other database driven CMS. You will notice that performance degrades to unacceptable levels once you start adding more and more modules. Drupal 6.0 comes with lot of performance improvements. It also comes with support for scalability using Squid or Pound. We are using drupal and ubercart for our free press release distribution site PressReleasePoint. It is composed of more than 50 drupal modules. We are waiting to upgrade to drupal 6.0 It will take some time because other modules are not yet avaialable for Drupal 6.0 core. We hope that we can improve performance of PressReleasePoint with new Drupal 6.0.
The other great thing about Drupal is the documentation. That’s one of the biggest reason why I chose Drupal over some of the other open source CMS packages (and I’ve tried a bunch too). I agree with you that it’s a very, very flexible system. Well thought out and well organized. Maybe a steeper learning curve than some of the others, but well worth it. And per your post, it sounds like v6 might address some of the usability issues from prior versions.
My only fear is upgrading my old 5.x sites to 6.x — something always breaks with these major version upgrades. Oh well…