Published
2008-08-27 12:07
My self-appointed job is to hangout around here and complain about how CiviCRM could be more like Drupal or better implemented with Drupal. Instead of banning me from the forums and IRC for being annoying, Lobo gave me blogging access. So I'm writing to share about my latest campaign to Druplify CiviCRM.
All the installations I build are done with Drupal, and I've written or improved a number of Drupal 5 modules that interface with CiviCRM. I also have a fairly wide base of clients who are on Drupal 5, might like CiviCRM 2.1+, but can't or won't upgrade to Drupal 6.
So I'm trying to get a sense of how many others there are like me, and perhaps formalize a "task force" to improve Drupal & CiviCRM integration. The very first task would be backporting CiviCRM 2.1 for Drupal 5, which remains supported by the Drupal Project.
Details are on the forum:
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,4503.0.html
Please speak up if this is something that is of interest to you, especially if you can provide coding assistance or sponsorship.
Comments
Hi, I think this is a good discussion. I'm a relative n00b to the Drupal and CiviCRM scene, say a few months or so, but this is my experience. I have 3 clients who would not mind updating to Drupal 6 and are very eager to upgrade to CiviCRM 2.1. They often ask me to do things that push CiviCRM 2.0.x to the limits of its functionality, particularly in regards to Profiles and how they do (or do not) smoothly integrate into Drupal. None of my clients would refuse to upgrade to Drupal 6.
Now that most of the other third-party modules for Drupal that predictably anchor the main production functions of their sites are finally available for Drupal 6, CiviCRM support for D6 has been the gate for migration. We're looking forward to a more efficient resource footprint from D6, too. I have my hands in 3 CiviCRM sites at present.
Unfortunately, my schedule has recently prevented getting much hands-on time with pre-release CiviCRM 2.1, so I'm among the hordes hanging back and waiting for the "shipping condition" milestone.
I have 3 client sites that use CiviCRM and Drupal 5; we want to move all of them to D6 to gain from more efficient server resource footprints.
the gating factors that have held me off migration so far included quite a few strategic third-party modules that hadn't been ported; now, CiviCRM 2.1 will be the last of them.
the Drupal dev community is already hard at work on Drupal 7; while no-one has said anything definitive about D5 End-Of-Life, I hope it's not far away -- because forcing the dev community to keep lugging around the burden of maintaining old architectures will inevitably retard progress at the leading edge. D6 is a decent advance over D5, and the dust on its release is now settled. [D7 will be an even larger jump forward, but that's of course going to be another year away yet.]
same thing is true here with CiviCRM development resources. with the best will in the world, I suspect you may be underestimating the hassle of maintaining a backport; and why not apply the same talent that would go into that toward improving CiviCRM 2.x or 3.x instead? surely that would best leverage your/our development chops to benefit the biggest audience?
imho, we should migrate as soon as CiviCRM 2.1 ships.
best,
Adrian
Adrian Russell-Falla
"the gating factors that have held me off migration so far included quite a few strategic third-party modules that hadn't been ported; now, CiviCRM 2.1 will be the last of them."
As soon as the 6.0 version of LDAP Integration is stable (it's currently in alpha) I would be happy to move to Drupal 6. Until then, not. This is a long-winded way of saying that yes, 3rd-party module support for Drupal 6 is still a gating factor.
I have to agree with the spirit of many of the comments made before mine. I would be much more interested in work to further integrate CiviCRM into Drupal (things like CiviNode and making CiviCRM groups automatically sync with Drupal groups, etc.). Given a choice of working on supporting old, almost end of life, Drupal 5.x and pushing to ensure that CiviCRM is not the primary gate on adopting Drupal 7 (as CiviCRM has been for adopting Drupal 6), I would much rather see work on D7 support than back porting to D5.