I have been planning to try to build a shopping store with Drupal 7 just for fun and have been studying it for a few days now. But with its current status(alpha5), I doubt if my time and effort would be worthwhile. If I use 6, I am afraid I can’t apply my experience with it to 7 because, you know, the latter is way way better and different. Could you please give me an advice as to how should I approach this? Given I stick with 7, which aspects of development I should focus for now until the final release comes? Waiting for the final release before studying isn’t an option because I couldn’t find any better things to do other than this on my spare time.
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Drupal 7 only has on this time of writing 40 critical bugs left, which means that it’s pretty close to rc-1. This means that Drupal 7 is not all that unstable, the APIs should be in place etc. So you shouldn’t expect any major changes from now on, only bug fixes etc.
This doesn’t mean that you should use Drupal 7 for production sites, but you actually could if you don’t do fancy stuff etc. So you could start learning Drupal with Drupal 7.
One thing you have to think about though, is that Drupal 7 doesn’t have all the modules available that Drupal 6 has, and it will probably take some time even after Drupal 7 is released, before all the major modules have been ported. So unless you can wait developing for quite some time, Drupal 6 might not be a bad place to start. Integrating with modules is also a bit part of developing with Drupal and that’s something you also will have a hard time doing with D7 for now.
Another thing to take into consideration, is that the API is not changing that much like it did from D5 to D6, so starting with Drupal 6 is not a bad place at all. A lot of the stuff that’s new in Drupal 7 is not APIs you’ll be using for simple sites.
Conclusion
You can start developing with Drupal 7 now, but you might have an easier time and learn more if you start with Drupal 6. The changes will be small and you should be able to adjust without problems.