One of the challenges in providing the architecture for a Drupal 6 site is leveraging existing contributed modules. A client might say they want to be able to forward content to a friend. Oh, well there are a couple contrib modules you can use but how do you find out if a module will be updated to Drupal 6 and where it might be in that process if at all?

For example, with the site_map module you can thankfully learn the maintainer's intentions from the project page. If the maintainer isn't as forthcoming with information the next step would be to check out the issue queue, because inevitably someone will ask about Drupal 6 (and hopefully without filing an issue with priority critical).

A lot of people are interested in using Drupal 6 so chances are there'll be an issue on the first or second page, if not then search is your friend! In this case, for the send module, search doesn't return any issues about a port to Drupal 6 =(. On search result pages you get a very useful permalink and a feed to subscribe to at the bottom of the page, a great way to know if an issue pops up with keywords you're interested in.

Perhaps the maintainer has started work but hasn't posted an issue so the next step might be to check the CVS commit messages for the module. You can find a link to CVS commit messages for modules on the project page in the Development section. The commit messages page also has a link to the RSS feed for CSV commits at the bottom. Thanks Drupal!

If you haven't found anything yet you might try widening your search or you may just have to open an issue on the project about it. But please, don't mark the issue as critical (critical to you is not critical to everyone).

Other than just opening an issue you should also consider how you can help the maintainer get towards a 6.x release by running the coder module, reviewing and testing patches, or even writing patches. There's a good handbook page that lists some of the ways you can contribute.

Last of all, there's a wiki page documenting module's and their 6.x update status that sure could use some love!

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