DEV Community

Ryan McConnell
Ryan McConnell

Posted on

1

Defining Drupal - What is the difference between all these different Drupal versions?

confused puppies

There are three different versions of Drupal that you could download and install today: Drupal 6, Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. On top of that, maybe you’ve heard about this Drupal 9 that’s coming out. Which one should you choose? What’s the difference?

First off, Drupal 6, while popular, is no longer being supported by the Drupal community. I would not build a site in Drupal 6, especially since there’s no benefit these days to doing so.

Drupal 7 is the most popular version of Drupal right now and will be supported until November of 2021. Drupal 7 has a lot of things going for it: extensive documentation, lots of public modules, and plenty of support from those who have websites on it. However, it is super difficult to migrate a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8, so upgrades after November 2021 will be much harder and the site will likely have security issues. In 2019, I don’t recommend building a Drupal 7 site, especially since it will teach you outdated ways of using Drupal and it would be better to start with Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 has less documentation and public modules, but it is currently supported. In addition, when Drupal 9 launches in June 2020, the migration will be as simple as a core update. This means creating a Drupal 8 site may be more difficult up front, but in the long run will be much easier to maintain. As we go forward, I’m going to focus on creating a Drupal 8 site since I believe that is the best bet for building a Drupal site in 2019. If you want to build a Drupal 7 site, then good news! There’s lots of options on the web for learning how to do that. I’d start here: https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/install

AWS Security LIVE!

Tune in for AWS Security LIVE!

Join AWS Security LIVE! for expert insights and actionable tips to protect your organization and keep security teams prepared.

Learn More

Top comments (0)

A Workflow Copilot. Tailored to You.

Pieces.app image

Our desktop app, with its intelligent copilot, streamlines coding by generating snippets, extracting code from screenshots, and accelerating problem-solving.

Read the docs

👋 Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❤️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay