By Veerendra Darakh on

Greetings to all ye Drupal gurus,

This is pertaining to the site www.dentistrytoday.info (made in drupal 6.34).

It is a plain simple discussion forum for dentists.I want to create a forum which has all the conceivable features a forum should have. So step by step i was adding modules on the forums.

My other plans for the future were to conduct dental continuing education webinars, add a dental consumables ecommerce section on the site etc etc.

Now since support to drupal 6 is ending what are my options?

Here are my stray thoughts on the issue:

 Upgrade to drupal 8:- I do not know how much forum friendly is drupal 8 and whether D8 has a forum module.

 Upgrade to drupal 7:- I camot decide whether it is worth the time & money to upgrade to D7 especially since D8 has been released. I also do not know whether D7 has a forum module.

 Continue with drupal 6.34:- The site is associated. with cloud flare. I could associate it with more security sites or add more security features of required. Let me mention that cloudflare has not been completely successful in stopping spam registrations.

 Shift it to some other CMS:- Which CMS supports forums the best? Wordpress, Java forums, VBulletin , php forums. Please suggest.

My requirements are fairly basic:

* Forums must be mobile friendly
* Plenty of developers must be available. ( I am told that developers for other CMS;s are more easily available as compared to Drupal)
* development charges must be economical, ( I am told that Drupal development is expensive compared to other CMS's )
* tips & tricks must be freely available on the net,
* addition of sections/ modules /plugins must be easy,
* the CMS must be easy to configure & plenty of themes must be available,
* it must be easy to change the decor of the site etc.
* It must be easy to block spam.

So what should be my future course of action.

Please also critique www.dentistrytoday.info from all aspects.

Hope to see a lot of responses & many thanks in advance for the same.

Regards,
Dr. Veerendra Darakh

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Your D6 site isn't going to quit working. See https://www.drupal.org/d6-lts-support for an explanation.

Forum module is in Drupal core on both D7 and D8.

Personally, I would upgrade from D6 to D7, primarily because it's mature and well-supported by the community. There are significant differences (improvements) over D6, but it's not as shockingly different as D8. Most of the process should be relatively straightforward, but of course it should be done with backups in place and only after testing.

In order to upgrade to D8, you would have to use the Migrate module, whose Web-based user interface is not yet mature (most site developers write code and use Migrate's API).

Your D7 site should be supported for several more years.