4.7.3 Vs 4.6.14

Question

I am a complete CiviCRM noob I am the ICT adviser to a small non-profit Paramedic service. We are going to be using CiviCRM to replace a ancient filemaker database.

I thought I was doing the right thing and installing the latest version of CiviCRM but it seem that just about none of the extension are compatible with 4.7.3

Am I missing something should I have installed 4.6.14 instead, if so is there a way to downgrade without having to start again?

I would not be to concerned but much of the features we are looking for are only covered by extensions

thanks in advance

Zeak

Answer 1

In general, 4.7 is a "development" release. 4.6 is a "long term support (LTS) release". Most people would recommend 4.6 (or even 4.4!) for very stable websites, and only using 4.7 if you need the latest features or are developing for the future.

As an extension contributor myself, there's a reasonable functionality jump between 4.6 and 4.7, so it may be some time until every extension is on there, and some may never get there. It depends on the extension and the developers who maintain them.

Unfortunately, there is no way to "downgrade". Your best options are to:

1) Manually download and install the extensions, put them in the extensions directory, and then test them. They will probably mostly work, but you will need to do this testing yourself.

2) Contact the developers of the key extensions, asking them for a timeframe of when they will be supporting 4.7

3) Hire a freelancer or agency to update them to 4.7 for you. I would be more than happy to do this - http://civifirst.com, or you could look for a partner agency at http://civicrm.org/partners-contributors.

4) If you do decide to move to 4.6, you can easily export and import your configurations and data. If you find yourself needing to do this, do ask here in a different thread.

Answer 2

In terms of Extensions, and we (Fuzion) have contributed a fair few of them, I think it is fair to say that in our case, since all our clients are still on 4.6.x, we simply have not had cause to see what breakages might happen with 4.7.

We build extensions with the long-term in mind and since Eileen is very much part of the team outside of core that is helping with that long-term view (and building API etc) i would expect our extensions to be as future-proofed as was possible at the time of the original build.

It can be really helpful to the community if you and others can help push these community assets forward by doing some testing of Extensions on 4.7 and reporting back via their git repository as to how much the fail/succeed.