Hi all,
Hope you're all well. Been a while since I posted here. Have a question and I wonder if anyone can help please. I'm helping a large charity choose a CMS to re-platform on to. Drupal 8 is a possible candidate, but some of the stakeholders there have concerns over Drupal 8 to 9, thinking that it could be like 7 to 8.
Assuming they have a site on D8, which is mostly core, with a minimal amount of contrib, could anyone give me an opinion on how long an update from 8 to 9 might take please? My assumption is that the bigger part of this will be the point at which the Symfony 3 to 4 update happens, which could be done from Drupal 8.8,x onwards - in which case, could anyone suggest how long that sort of update might take?
So far, I've told them the following to provide some context - do let me know if you don't agree with that...
Currently Symfony is on version 3, and this reaches end of life (EOL) in November 2021, which in turn brings Drupal 8’s end of life to November 2021.
The target launch date for Drupal 9 is 9th June 2020, which gives about 17 months to upgrade from Drupal 8, which by then will be on version 8.9, with both 8.8 and 8.9 supported.
Drupal 8.7 launches in May 2019 and Drupal 8.8 in December 2019. If CLIENT chose Drupal it’s likely they will launch on 8.7 and will certainly need to figure on an update to 8.8, and possibly 8.9 depending on how quickly Drupal 9 is adopted. Drupal 9 will be on Drupal 9.2 before Drupal 8.9 reaches EOL.
The upgrade to Drupal 9 is being touted as being ‘easy’ according to Drupal creator Dries Buytaert. While any such claims should be properly explored, there is a considered approach as to how Drupal 9 and latest Symfony dependencies will be built into Drupal 8. As such, for site owners it is said that ‘Drupal 9 will simply be the last version of Drupal 8, with its deprecations removed. This means we will not introduce new, backwards-compatibility breaking APIs or features in Drupal 9 except for our dependency updates’
To better mitigate the risk of any dependency updates the key factor to keep an eye on is the point at which Drupal 8 is compatible with Symfony 4. This is scheduled for Drupal 8.8.0 in December 2019. As such this may create an argument for any plan to move to Drupal to not happen before this point.
Thanks
Alick
Comments
Drupal core 8 to 9 upgrade is
Drupal core 8 to 9 upgrade is like any Drupal version upgrade, For the modules, it won't be too much as the only thing which has to be taken care is to remove the deprecated functions used in the module, as of now more than 44% of contributed modules will work in Drupal as they are.
Thanks Saurabh. Hope you're
Thanks Saurabh. Hope you're well?
So you're saying 8.9.x to 9.0.x will be as easy 8.8.x to 8.9.x as an example?
Does the same apply if the 8.9.x is on Symfony 3?
Can I ask Saurabh where you
Can I ask Saurabh where you get the 44% figure from - is there a link?
Thanks
Alick
Yeah, its mentioned in Dries
Yeah, its mentioned in Dries blog https://dri.es/how-to-prepare-for-drupal-9
Thanks!
Thanks!
There is a work in progress
There is a work in progress to support Drupal 8 with Symfony 4, can find more detail here https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2937984
So per planning yeah, it's like upgrading a version