What version of Drupal should I choose?

Question

Today is the first time I entered Drupal website in order to get my head around it and was met by API pages for versions 6, 7, 8.

I think 8 is in production, but anyway - what is the best version to use at the moment?

Answer 1

Drupal 7 is the current release version, but still relatively recent.

Here's my advice:

• In most cases, pick Drupal 7.

• Pick Drupal 6 if there are specific modules that you want to use which are not yet available for Drupal 7. (but check if they're going to be converted soon, or would be easy to convert yourself, or if there's an alternative module you could use instead, because you may still want to go with D7 anyway)

• Drupal 8 won't be released for quite a long time yet, so there's really no reason to be looking at that now, unless you're planning to assist with the development of it.

[EDIT] Re the comment asking for further info:

Drupal 8 is still too early in development to say much about; they haven't even finalised what features it will have yet.

Comparing D7 vs D6: Here's the D7 release info page: http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0.

You may also find this page useful: http://drupal.org/documentation/version-info

Answer 2

Having developed many sites using drupal I am still not confident in using D7 for productions sites.

Unless your needs are quite basic it's quite possible to find out that you are in need of a plugin that is not yet converted to D7.

If you are not planning to build your own theme, then there are still much more available (free or paid) for D6 than D7.