Drupal 6 was released on February 13th, 2008. D6 was the most celebrated CMS at the time, promising the world to users with various cutting-edge features. But, it has been almost 8 years since the release and the entire field of technology has moved on. Drupal, being one of the few CMSs that is not afraid to change, has now released Drupal 8 to meet the futuristic requirement of the web.

Top 5 Compelling Reasons To Migrate From Drupal 6

Reason 1: The Community Will No Longer Support Drupal 6

We encourage all of our clients to migrate from Drupal 6, as the Drupal Community will no longer render ANY support starting February 26th, 2016. That means that any Drupal 6 website will not receive any security patches, core updates, functionality compatible modules or other benefits of being in a community based open source CMS.

Reason 2: Poor Security Features In Drupal 6

As technology evolves, hackers and online crime grows along with it. Not only will there be no new security updates for Drupal 6, but even existing security features and encryption methods are not quite strong or efficient in D6:

• The password system is only in the MD5 method, without any hash techniques to keep the website data secured.
• The login security is not quite competent when compared to its future versions.
• Security updates via Cron are not available as a scheduled task in Drupal 6, involving manual interference for every security update.

Reason 3: Poor Usability Features

With Drupal 8 making its debut, website admins are taking advantage of its WYSIWYG editor to make on-page changes to their website. Drupal 6 users are still stuck with the ancient way of doing things, which is time consuming and less-efficient. For example, D6 has:

• No options for the ‘drag-and-drop’ feature to perform seamless website administration tasks.
• No quick edit links in the admin interface for Drupal 6.
• No ‘Shortcuts’ option is available to let users create their own menu for the pages they frequently visit.
• No time zone support, making global site maintenance a huge problem.

Reason 4: Poor Database Structure And Compatibly

A proper database structure is essential any website. In this competitive digital world, having an advanced database structure and compatibility is advised. Sadly, Drupal 6 is lacking in this:

• Drupal 6 doesn’t use Query builders like INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE, and SELECT.
• Not much support is available for master/slave replication, transactions, multi-insert queries, and many other features.
• The SQLite database engine is not supported.
• Drupal 6 has less scalability and data integrity, as it is default to MyISAM engine rather than InnoDB.

Reason 5: Poor support for multi-site installation, SEO, web linking, testing framework and many other essential web building tools for achieving maximum ROI.

If you are still on Drupal 6, then you are probably confused about the various options that are out there. For the confused souls who are thinking about which version of Drupal they should be choosing, our Fact Sheet has listed out the options to help you make the best business decision.