Drupal 6.x vs 7.x for Multiple Domains and LDAP

Question

We're looking at using Drupal for our public sites, which will have:

• multiple primary domains
• multiple sub-domains

We will need to allow our users

• to authenticate against LDAP
• to get different roles per site
• to share content across primary and sub-domains.

Looking at the modules that are stable and under active development, 6.2x looks better than 7; of course 7 is very new. If we go with 6.2 now, we'll have to upgrade to 7 later; if we go with 7 now, we won't have all the functionality that exists in 6.2, specifically LDAP.

How would you address this situation of 6.2 vs 7.x? If you came across this situation, how did you make the decisions? What risks did you weigh? What direction did you go in?

Answer 1

This one is easy: go with 6.2.x!

Despite being new and exciting and all of that, Drupal 7 still is very lacking in the stable contrib department. Also, despite the huge number of modules that adopted the D7X pledge, a lot of important and frequently-used modules still don't have stable versions (ahem, Views! say what you want - "beta" and "dev" are not stable enough for enterprise purposes)

Drupal 7 also introduced some API changes that, despite not being huge, still mean that there's a small new learning curve to developing Drupal 7 modules.

Drupal 6, on the other hand, is more than stable and has plentiful offerings for modules including LDAP integration and anything else you might need. Since it's been around for a couple years now, there's no shortage of experienced developers who can aid in implementing the site and developing custom modules.

As far as having to upgrade to Drupal 7 eventually, despite it being a valid point in deciding which version to use, who said you have to be running the latest version? As far as I know enterprises take longer than most to adopt new technologies.

Quite frankly, developing for Drupal 7 (specially large and mission-critical software) is a lot more expensive and complicated at the moment than using Drupal 6 and I would strongly advice against it for at least 3-6 months to wait and see how contrib modules will react and see how it will be adopted in general by the community.