By Stephanie Guico
If your organization uses Drupal for your websites, you have probably heard that Drupal 9 is coming this summer. The Drupal community plans to release Drupal 9 on June 3, 2020, alongside a long-term-support (LTS) minor release of Drupal 8 . Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 will be supported until November 2021; after that, security updates may not be provided by the Drupal community.
Drupal 9 will include a number of new features. Other reasons to upgrade include:
- Security: It’s vital to use software that has active support for security fixes. The Drupal community releases security updates regularly, with specifics about what features are involved. Once your version of Drupal is no longer supported, there will no longer be security updates for your code and your website will be vulnerable.
- Continuing development: New versions of Drupal 9 will be released every six months, with additional improvement and new features.
- Opportunity to make improvements: Conducting regular audits of websites to see what is working and what are pain points is always a good idea. You may also want to do a design refresh at the same time.
- Assured upgrade path: The Drupal community is committed to making upgrades from Drupal 9 to future versions of Drupal easy.
Whether upgrading from Drupal 8 to 9 or Drupal 7 to 9, CoLab can help
We have re-implemented many Drupal 7 sites in Drupal 8, with a dedicated Drupal Migration Team. We have an established process for Drupal migrations, including users, documents, images, nodes, workflows, roles, permissions, and redirects. We can recommend replacements for deprecated Drupal 7 modules. Our Migration Planning team can work with you to determine what to migrate into Drupal 9 and what to leave behind, including incorporating content clean-up in the process.
As soon as Drupal 9 is released (scheduled for June 3, 2020), we’ll test the tools for upgrading from Drupal 8, document the best process, and be ready to help you with your Drupal 8-to-9 upgrade.
Need more information on upgrades? Check out our Drupal 9 page.
If you’d like to talk through the upgrade path with one of our developers, or want to know what an upgrade may involve for you site, email us at friends@colab.coop.