Recommended upgrade for my civiCRM with Drupal 6

Question

I'm currently using civiCRM 4.4.2 with Drupal 6.

I would like to know if I should upgrade it first to another version, or upgrade it directly to 4.7.5.

What do you recommend?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You don't mention any extensions on your site so if that is not an issue then I think you are as well going to 4.7.x

If you do have extensions then you might want to check things out before going past 4.6.x which is a LTS (long term support) version and has probably had more extensions verified for it than for 4.7.x

Of course if you do have extensions, it helps the community to know if you find any issues on 4.7.x and reporting them back to the maintainers or contributing patches or funds to help ensure they do work on that release.

Answer 2

It depends on your release strategy? There are several options:

1. Always upgrade to the latest version. This ensures that you have the latest functionality and security fixes (advantage) but will also run the risk of finding new bugs that no one identified before (downside)
2. Stay on the latest LTS (Long Term support) which is more defensive but arguably more stable. I usually recommend customers to stay on the LTS unless they need the latest and greatest. Security fixes will always also be released for the LTS version, which at the moment is 4.6
   3. Stay on whatever release you want to stay on because you do not want to be troubled by testing after upgrades. Obvious downsides are that you will run a security risk (unless you apply or backport all security patches to your version) and that you miss the new functionality.

If you want to stay on the latest, you can upgrade directly from 4.4.2 to 4.7.5. As petednz mentions, it also depends on if you have any extensions/customizations

Answer 3

Ultimately it depends on the extensions you have installed. I just got off the phone with a different client who I recommended updating to 4.6.11