Hello everyone,

I went to my first Drupal Meetup on Wednesday night and really enjoyed the experience. Thanks to Lauren for setting up a great meetup.

I'm new to Drupal, and have noticed that for anything you want to do, there are several modules that may do the job, but which one should I choose?

Specifically, if you have implemented a trouble ticket system, which one did you use and why?

Also, if you are hosting several separate clients, did you set up a multi-site or keep them separate? I understand the ease of update with multi-site, but are there security issues?

Thanks for looking. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

James Laughlin

We check both drupal.org and drupalmodules.com for the following:

• That the module has a green/recommended release for our version of Drupal
  
• The reviews of the module (both on the sites and Googling for it)
  
• The date of the last release and CVS activity (is it no longer under development, or is it just "finished" and stable?)
  
• Support/patch/forum activity (are other people using the module? What problems are they running into? Is the author responsive?)
  
• Author availability (has the author committed to updates? Are they available for consulting/email/help/etc.? Did they pledge to port to the next version of Drupal?)
  

You'll find that limiting to recommended releases narrows your options quite a bit, and looking at the release dates and forum activity will show you the one or two modules that the community actively uses.

At that point, install them both and try them both out, try to make them both do what you need. Still tied? If you're a developer, go through the code and see if it's comprehensible, if it follows best practices and if it provides hooks or db_rewrite_sql for extensibility. If you're not, see which one has more information about it (both real documentation and blog posts or conference talks you find through Google).