Drupal 8 is coming. The countdown is underway. It could be here by October. If past experiences with recent major Drupal releases is any indication, October may be on the early side; major Drupal versions are released only when ready, with 0 known critical bugs, and that could take longer than 7 months. But when it happens, one thing is for sure:
Community support for Drupal 6 will disappear!
As a Drupal user, it’s very likely that you already know that the strength of Drupal comes from its community. So losing that community support is a big deal.
The policy is this: The Drupal community supports the current release and the previous release. Today, Drupal 7 is the current release and Drupal 6 is the previous release. Both versions get community support for and bug fixes and those critical security updates. (The current release always gets the most attention; the previous release usually gets bug fixes only if they’re really major or critical.)
Drupal receives community support for the current release and the previous release. The next release is bleeding edge, while older releases languish, unsupported.
Once Drupal 8.0 comes out, community support for Drupal 6 disappears. That is not the time to start thinking about upgrading. The time to start thinking about it, budgeting for it, planning it is now!
What are your options?
If you’re currently on Drupal 6, you have three paths to choose from to ensure that your site’s codebase receives community support past the Drupal 8.0 release date:
- Examine Drupal 8, start mapping out your upgrade strategy – identify what you can upgrade, what will require crossgrades, what new things you may want to embrace, what old things you can safely let go of – and begin your upgrade process as soon as Drupal 8 reaches Release Candidate stages, so that you can go live right around when Drupal 8 comes out.
- Caveats: This is the bleeding edge approach. Many contributed modules will lag behind the core Drupal release, so some functionality may require delay or custom implementation.
- Benefits: The upside is that you get to enjoy that Drupal 8 goodness all the sooner. And you will be on a codebase with community support all the way until Drupal 10.0 is released, which likely won't happen until many years from now.
- Upgrade to Drupal 7 now, or certainly before Drupal 8.0 is released. Drupal 7 has reached maturity. The code is stable. There are literally thousands of contributed modules that you can leverage to make your site much richer than it would be otherwise.
- Caveats: While you will be extending your site code’s community-supported life, it will be only until Drupal 9.0 is released, so your upgrade investment’s shelf life is shorter.
- Benefits: You get to enjoy Drupal 7 now, which is mature, with thousands of contributed modules, and already represents a big improvement over Drupal 6. Also your upgrade to Drupal 8 (or 9) down the road will be easier than it would be if you’re upgrading from Drupal 6.
- Take your chances and wait until Drupal 8.0 is out and contributed modules you need are available.
- Caveats: You will be running unsupported code once Drupal 8.0 is out, so you’ll have to move very quickly at that point. Remember that any web development project may takes weeks or even months to complete, depending upon complexity and availability of resources, and throughout that period your current site will be running without any community support. For some people and organizations, that’s okay, but for mission-critical sites, it could be a risky way to go. Unsupported code is the other bleeding edge.
- Benefits: You can put off your investment for now and keep things status quo. And you an always embrace option 1 or 2 next month or next quarter.
Our recommendation is to seriously consider option 2, for two reasons:
- Bleeding edge can bleed profusely, and it’s all the more hemorrhagic before the stable release comes out. On the other hand, waiting while riding unsupported code can leave your website or webapp vulnerable. Remember, older versions of Drupal have older requirements for PHP, MySQL, and so on; infrastructure resources available can diminish over time as your site’s technical requirements rely on increasingly outmoded technologies.
- The release cycle for Drupal of late is on the order of 3 years, and that’s an eternity on the interwebs. It might be a good idea to plan an online refresh cycle that coincides with each stable Drupal release, if for nothing else than to occasion a review of your online strategy and assessment of your key performance indicators. Right now, 2008-era sites are downright stone-age; imagine what a 2010 (Drupal 6) site will look like in 2017!
Drupal 8 > Drupal 7+1
Every major release of Drupal brings new features, improved architecture, freedom from some outmoded code, and new power in flexibility. In all the years I've been working with Drupal (since 2004), I've never seen a new Drupal release as profound as Drupal 8. This is going to going to be the biggest, most significant upgrade in the history of Drupal, with improvements such as new configuration tools to manage layouts and views, more native mobile and HTML5 support, RESTful web services, various usability improvements, a delightful new Twig templating engine, and a new underlying foundation of Symfony making all these things and more performant and more powerful.
And if you’re like many of us and feel that Drupal 8 can’t come soon enough, there are many ways to pitch in. All are welcome!
And if you’re still on Drupal 5...
...Your upgrade is already years overdue. Get on it!
Comments
I have been planning on upgrading my D6 site for a very long time. However, since I've seen few (or almost no) successful upgrades completed, I'm not sure its even doable. And I have no custom code on my site.
I may have to abandon my existing site in place, create a new D7 site and try to migrate years of data over. Not fun.
Eric
Eric, don't be daunted. Have you looked at the upgrade process instructions? http://drupal.org/node/570162 walks you through step-by-step. It may seem complicated, but what it really calls for is patience. You just have to work through each step methodically, one at a time, and eventually you get there!
Also, if you have images in the picture, a few months ago I blogged about migrating images from the old Image module to the new Drupal core image module (which are very very different). Not sure if it applies in your case, but maybe it will help. There's a lot of knowledge out there being shared. Google is your friend!
See also the Drush Site Upgrade tool [http://drupal.org/project/drush_sup]. This takes the tedium out of following the Drupal upgrade process (at least some of it!), which requires that updatedb be run many times.
Thanks for sharing that. More Drush power!
I tried the Drush method on one simple site with no luck... May need to try again tho.
Eric
I have a couple of D6 sites that need a complete rebuild within a year or two so I'm thinking of just waiting for D8 to be mature enough, though I could start with D7 assuming the sites I put together will upgrade easily to D8. It would be interesting to have a concise list of the direction / features that we can expect with D8 for those of us who aren't following Drupal news closely. For example, Views will be in core so that's obviously the route to take. Entities are the future? What about file management approaches? I know that with Open Source it's hard to know which developers will be there for the D8 push but there are general
If I start working on the D7>D8 upgrade of these sites I don't want to use the old modules I'm familiar from my work in 2007. Some of them are probably getting old/abandoned and won't come forward to D8 (such as WebFM which seemed really cool 6 years ago). What about IMCE, that seems pretty constricted compared to the FileField approach. There were many somewhat redundant solutions around D6 and D7 and experienced Drupal developers probably have a sense for the vibrant strategies for future to use in D7 anticipating "good practices" with D8. Thanks
Eric Aitala wrote:
There is a new module based on Migrate for this alternative way to upgrade:
Drupal-to-Drupal data migration
http://drupal.org/project/migrate...
Laura, thanks for the great article. I want to bring into the mix the perspective of someone who works exclusively with small clients.
I'm a site-builder, working with small non-profits and businesses. By small, I mean really small; I have several clients who have one or two employees. I do direct a lot of potential customers to Wordpress, but I do only Drupal. I think Drupal is awesome. And just because you are small, doesn't mean you don't have custom needs that Drupal can address really well.
But I'm concerned about Drupal 8 and dropping support for Drupal 6. (Although I think March/April, 2014 is a more likely date than the range you gave.) I preach to my clients about the amazing process and community that develops Drupal, and they think that's lovely, but they don't understand the connection with that and why they would need to spend a lot of money if something isn't broken. I'm explaining to them about the whole loss of community support with 8 coming out, but what makes more sense to them is my talking to them about the benefits of a site facelift to keep current with design trends and their general image.
Another issue, especially for small folks like me who also help my clients with their social media, email marketing and membership management (CiviCRM)... so I'm not doing all Drupal all the time, is what a huge leap Drupal 7 is over Drupal 6. Entities are more abstract, so they are more flexible and powerful. But they are also harder to wrap your brain around and can also be difficult to implement. I'm probably ready to give Commerce another try, but it was just too big a leap for me given limited budgets and small clients who needed working ecommerce functionality. I was so thankful that Ubercart still exists for Drupal 7. I just finished my first Organic Groups installation in D7. Wow, that evolution tells a story in itself. I'm so glad I didn't jump on board when OG 7.x-1.x was the recommended release. That was a disaster. I think OG 7.x-2.x is pretty impressive. But I think the OG community is fairly burnt out from the whiplash that has been the D7 experience and so there is barely any documentation for for 2.x.
I know two programmers who don't work full time in Drupal, but have been programmers their whole carreers, who were building a site in which the Media module almost buried them alive. They came desperate to me, a site-builder, and I bailed them with less bleeding edge solutions. Seems like Media module is more a proof-of-concept about the power of entities and RESTful services... but can you really get it to work if you don't have a huge team behind you?
In short, I'm concerned that Drupal development is moving too fast and that there will be some really tough times in trying to continue to provide my clients with the service and srt that they've come to know and which I enjoy providing.
Shai, I share your perspective and don't hear it explained very often -- and especially not this clearly. The 'functional elegance' of Drupal often buries me in its complexity as I try to first integrate Drupal components into a working site, and then explain to clients how to use it and why it's a better solution than something else. Many days I feel a bit like a Citroen salesman trying to explain why the car's worth the money even though you'll have to drive an hour to find a mechanic and mortgage your house for the parts ;-).