Drupal 6 Websites Support

Hello Everyone,

Drupal 6 sites are becoming a little old now, but Drupal is very popular and many site owners have web properties that are quite extensive. Massive, in fact.

If these sites are to remain online and well looked-after, we need people prepared to maintain them.

Are you Prepared to Maintain Drupal 6?

In the interest of making such service available to Drupal 6 site owners, please reply to this post if you or your company are prepared to maintain and develop Drupal 6 websites, say until mid 2014, end 2014, later and/or until Drupal 6 end-of-life or end-of-life of any of the supporting infrastructure.

The market is there, I know of site owners actively looking for such service to maintain and develop Drupal 6 websites for at least another full year on Debian 6, Aegir 1 and I'm sure there are many more if I have a look at the top SA websites.

OS and PHP

Debian and Ubuntu are popular platforms to host on. Debian 6 support will end some time in 2014 and a new Ubuntu LTS will be out in April too (the previous LTS will be supported until 2017 of course). Newer servers mostly run PHP > 5.3, which can make hosting the older sites a bit troublesome.

Currently on our own servers we compile a separate older PHP 5.3 just to run the Drupal 6 websites, having taken over a dozen or so of them in terms of hosting when Hetzner discontinued PHP 5.3 support earlier this year. We host them for free because we do not feel we can put as much quality assurance behind them as we can with our own or Drupal 7 websites.

So there are workarounds.

Drupal 6

Drupal 6 will also face an end of life, most likely some time in 2014. I've read here and there that there may be people prepared to maintain it a little longer, but it will not have the massive community support we're used to for officially maintained Drupal core versions and their supporting modules.

We hosted Drupal 4 and 5 sites long after their end of life before, so it can be done, but it generates increasing work with less and less online reference as they age. It really starts feeling like the old days when you authored and maintained your own CMS.

Running Unsupported OSS Software

There's every chance that running older sites on older OSes and scripting languages will just work. It's very likely in fact. Being able to extend Drupal 6 sites' lifetime long enough for clients to be able to move directly to Drupal 8 is one very laudable goal as it makes for huge cost savings for a site owner.

Burtronix

We're committed to the websites we build. But with the massive amount of new technology coming our way in Drupal 8, Burtronix wants to avoid signing new Drupal 6 websites. We also feel that we are not able to provide our expected level of service and surety for unsupported operating systems, frameworks, scripting languages and CMSes. As such we'll be scaling down our Drupal 6 offering to best-effort service some time in 2014 and, with adequate time to prepare, also our Drupal 6 free hosting of other websites.

We still have one client on Drupal 6 with a site that's been with us for years. They're slowly budgeting for a new website, but there are also other clients looking for Drupal 6 service providers and if we cannot find a service provider for them, their work is so critically important, we'll have to keep providing Drupal 6 services on a case-by-case basis.

Kind regards,
Riaan