Should I install CiviCRM on an existing Drupal 6 site, or upgrade to Drupal 7?

[corrigan]

Our existing site is on Drupal 6.x.  Would it be reasonable to install CiviCRM on this site as is? We're happy with the existing site, and I wouldn't plan on upgrading it until Drupal stops doing security releases for 6.x.
But I'm wondering if we would save a lot of time by upgrading the main site to Drupal 7 now and then installing CiviCRM. The draw back being that I haven't done a major Drupal upgrade before and can see getting bogged down in that upgrade right now, and delaying our transition to CiviCRM.

Key questions:
1) Will it be secure/stable to run CiviCRM on Drupal 6 for the next year or so?
2) Is upgrading CiviCRM as part of a drupal upgrade from 6 to 7 a pain? (Or what is the ratio of pain for upgrading civiCRM compared to the rest of a fairly simple drupal site?)

Thanks!

[Donald Lobo]

1. civicrm on drupal6 is community maintained and supported. however so far it has not needed a lot of support, so things have worked out well. We think 4.3 will have the same track record as 4.2 for D6, so most likely things will work well. However the D6 community for civi is decreasing at a fast rate

2. for most cases, the upgrade is fairly easy.

lobo

[davem]

corrigan
D6's days are numbered: 8 will most likely be out late this year, so if you're doing other stuff, then I'd say look at upgrading now rather than leave it to the last minute. If your 6 is fairly simple, then the pain of upgrade should not be too great. First thing to check is do all your contrib modules exist for 7. If not you have a problem. Then note that your theme and views will break but depending on the site that's not too bad, and you can fix this in the background as the theme is all code and you can export/import the views so...
take a db dump,
upgrade spend some time fixing stuff
when it's all OK, grab theme and export views
put live into maintenance
take another dump
drop in your theme
import your views
make live.

As lobo says the civi part of the upgrade will be pretty easy. We've been doing lots of 6->7 upgrades and civi hasn't been an issue at all. So if 4.3 is good with D6 (we'll be testing that with the beta) then you have several months until 4.4 at least. Hope that's useful.

DaveM

[corrigan]

Cool, thanks for the quick responses!

It sounds like upgrading after installing Civi won't be too much hassle, so I'll roll out on our D6 setup now and deal with D7 later (but probably not much later).