I just installed Drupal 6 for a couple projects and I shouldn’t have. I should have installed Drupal 6 in some sort of fart around playground because it is a breeze to install and is gorgeous and intuitive and a brilliant next step. All the good default templates (AKA themes) are ported as well. Unfortunately, some of the nicest modules (AKA plugins) are not available for the Drupal 6 core yet. Very sad. Very very sad. But, all you need to do is wait. The same thing happened when I upgraded to version 2.3 of WordPress, too. That was a fiasco — huge changes in the MySQL tables broke everything and I had to yank loads of plugins. I am OK because I can work with Drupal 6 with my current installs because my favorite core modules, pathauto and Meta tags, are ported. Unfortunately, most of the cool tools I use on Memes.org are not. So, for now, stick with Drupal 5.7, no matter how tempted you are, especially if you rely heavily on 3rd party modules and plugins.

That said, what I would like to see ported completely ASAP are:

• Akismet
• Community Tags
• Page Title
• Tagadelic
• TinyMCE
• URL List
• Views (thanks, John Berns)*

There are more, but this is off the top of my head. *I think that Views is now out as 6.x-2.0-alpha2, but there are lots of warnings and caveats, so be warned.

I am off to join the crew of a sailboat that is about to set sail out of Acapulco.

Although this doesn’t sound like a plausible explanation, it is actually going to be a working sail. As I am an Associate of their firm, I will be sailing 1,500 nautical miles with a partner of Haft, Harrison, & Wolfson and we will be using this time to work out a couple projects and hammer down a business plan. I will be unavailable during the month of March but will be back and ready to rock late March or early April.