UMass Amherst Drupal Users Group: Thursday, May 3

I take a different view, starting with the long-term support from outside drupal.org and the Drupal Association.

There is a certain critical mass for volunteer work to keep something as large as Drupal safely and currently operational. The occasional patch is not the same thing.

But it is not the core that is my primary concern. It is the modules. Right now for Drupal 6, drupal.org suppots zero Drupal 6 modules. Yes a handful of modules are patched together, maybe enough to limp along, but most are not. I is a fair bet the really important things, like security and authentication, are not maintained carefully enough.

So people get the false impression it is really okay, and don't budget for change. Then they use lack of budget as an excuse to continue limping along in an unacceptable manner than that put the servers they reside on, the clients they serve, and their organizations at risk.

For Drupal 7, official support will exist for a while, and I expect core will be patched to some extent after that. But I am already seeing new module development focused or strictly on Drupal 8. I am seeing Drupal 7 modules dropping out of being supported, or very minimally being maintained.

So realistically, in an university environment like Umass for example, I am expecting mass conversions of sites in the summer of 2019. By sometime this summer I expect to see a lot fewer new sites in Drupal 7.