Here at pingVision we've largely switched over to making all of our clients' websites with Drupal 6 - there's a number of advantages in doing that, but sometimes there's one major disadvantage: The website they want would be great with module X, but module X doesn't have a Drupal 6 version yet.

In those cases, we convert 'em ourselves, and post a patch appropriately. I wrapped up updating the wonderful Invite module to Drupal 6, and that made me think back on the various updates we at pingVision have done so far:

• NodeCarousel
• NodeQueue
• Favorite Nodes
• Custom Error
• Profile Privacy
• Thickbox
• DrupalVB
• Invite
• And I'm working on upgrades for a few of the User Points Contributed Modules, especially userpoints_invite.

It's really kind of fun converting a module to Drupal 6 - for one, you really get a good feeling for how that module works. You also can learn some interesting features of Drupal's extensive API that you haven't run into before, and when you're done you've helped out the whole community.

Give it a try! Find a useful module that doesn't have a patch for Drupal 6 yet, get a copy of the most recent code, and open your browser to Converting 5.x Modules to 6.x and work your way along. Also, it can help to get a copy of Coder and use that to look for any changes you've overlooked.

Attached: A slide presentation that I did for a local Drupal meetup on upgrading modules to Drupal 6.

• John Fiala's blog
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