Drupal 8 is coming. It’s ready when it’s ready (i.e. there”s no cast iron guaranteed release date), but latest predictions are that the first stable release will be available from January of 2014 or thereabouts.
If your site is running Drupal version 6 then it’s time to start thinking about what your upgrade strategy will be. Hint: a quick and dirty way to find out the version number of your site is to look at the CHANGELOG.txt, e.g. https://drupal.org/CHANGELOG.txt
You should care because community support for Drupal 6 ends when Drupal 8 begins. This is because the Drupal community typically* supports only the current release and the previous release. By “support” we mean that only the current release and the previous release of Drupal receive (at least) bug fixes and important security updates. Paid professional support from your local Drupal expert provider will likely continue for the time being, but experts can better and more economically support you when there’s still community support.
Option #1 – Do nothing
Will your Drupal 6 site fall in a heap immediately after Drupal 8 officially goes live? No. But over time it will become slowly but increasingly vulnerable to exploitation in the absence of regular patching – which you’ve been attending to all along, right? 🙂 In the unfortunate event that your site does get hacked, then hopefully your Drupal tech person or company can fix the security vulnerability and re-instate your site from backups. Hopefully. Could be expensive…
Option #2 – Do nothing… wait to upgrade to Drupal 8 (bypassing Drupal 7)
The challenge with this approach is that, when Drupal 8 reaches it’s first version 1.0 stable release, you will not (initially) see a stampede of sites being converted from earlier versions of Drupal. Why not? 2 reasons:
- Drupal 8 will still be considered “bleeding edge”. Yes, the vast majority of bugs will have been resolved, but some will still remain, waiting to be revealed by those brave early adopters. We salute you!
- Many contributed modules will not be ready yet. They’ll catch up over time. So even if you are up for a bit of early adoption, you’re likely to find that some modules your site depends upon simply aren’t ready yet, even though Drupal core is.
The main adoption of Drupal 8 (new sites and converted sites from earlier major versions) is unlikely to occur until at least 6-12 months have passed since Drupal 8 officially goes live, so mid-late 2014 at the earliest. That’s at least 6-12 months of your Drupal 6 site being without community support. If your site is mission-critical for your organisation, this is a risk you might not want to take.
Option #3 – Upgrade to Drupal 7
All things considered this is the safest – and therefore recommended – option. Drupal 7 is an extremely popular and stable product, with the maximum Drupal “goodness” available to all. But if you’re very budget conscious and are comfortable with the risks of remaining on Drupal 6 while you wait for Drupal 8 to be ready – we understand. If you do invest in upgrading to Drupal 7, then your next upgrade to Drupal 8 will likely be less expensive than jumping from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8. Conversely, the total cost of the upgrade from Drupal 6 to 7, plus 7 to 8, is likely to be more than the single upgrade from 6 to 8.
Which option is right for you?
Compare notes with your Drupal expert suppliers. Examine your own risk profile. Check your budget. Get an estimate to upgrade. Then decide.
fyi (technical note): when we talk about “upgrading” your Drupal site from one major version to another, what we actually mean is “rebuilding” your site. There are tools such as https://drupal.org/project/migrate_d2d to assist us with migrating data/content between different major versions of Drupal, but essentially we’re rebuilding your site from scratch from a functional perspective. The act of rebuilding your “as is” site will cost less than when it was first built, but how much less will depend on a wide variety of factors including size, complexity, how much custom coding was done, etc.
Final thoughts
Does it annoy you that there’s this pressure (and cost) to upgrade? Perhaps no-one told you about this when building your site in Drupal in the first place. If this is you, bear in mind the following:
- It’s not just Drupal. All successful software packages go through major release upgrades over time. The only differences between them are a) how often and b) how smooth (economical) it is to upgrade between major version – if indeed it’s possible at all.
- The web is evolving at an incredible rate. Drupal 6 was released back in February of 2008 – that’s over 5 years ago a time of writing, with lots of the thought behind it occurring in the years and months before that. Feb 2008 was just after the first iPhone was released (June 2007), and over 2 years before the first iPad was released (April 2010) – how time flies! Keeping up with (or setting!) the latest trends is an ongoing challenge. We want to give you and your users the best online experience we can for today, and not for how things were 5+ years ago.
*STOP PRESS
Given the high number of Drupal 6 sites (a million or thereabouts), there’s been some recent discussion around the possibility of extending support – community and/or commercial – for Drupal 6 after the first stable release of Drupal 8 is announced. This is an dynamic situation, but a good couple of places to keep an eye on developments are these:
https://groups.drupal.org/node/299528
http://www.larks.la/articles/drupal-6-end-of-life-when-drupal-8-is-released-or-not