On the other side of Drupal 10 upgrade – what’s next for GovCMS

Monday 30 October 2023

Firstly, we would like to acknowledge your excellent communication and support during the Drupal 10 upgrade project. To get this over the line, we appreciated the professionalism and cooperation everyone displayed during the upgrade and within a busy year for all. We couldn’t have successfully transitioned agencies across without your amazing support, so thank you everyone from all the GovCMS crew!

On the other side of the Drupal 10 (D10) upgrade, GovCMS continues its path in delivering a strong, robust hosting service. There are a few important things happening between now and the December shutdown period. We want to share what’s kicking-off in the new year.

Drupal 9 (D9) will be End of Life (EOL) on 2 November 2023. We’ve made it through the D9-D10 upgrade for all the SaaS websites, and we’re still supporting PaaS websites across the line. We’ve already been in contact with everyone and tracking the process through various Service Desk tickets. PaaS websites that miss the D9 EOL deadline will move to a quarantined cluster incurring additional costs.

Update CKEditor4 to CKEditor5. The CKEditor4 module will cease security coverage at the end of 2023. To alleviate pressure from the D10 upgrade, it was split into its own mini project. Between now and the December shut down period, you must make the move from CKEditor 4 to 5. As part of the D10 upgrade, a ‘vanilla’ CKEditor5 text editor was created on each project in preparation for this next step. It’s very important that you do not make the switch from CKEditor4 to 5 directly on production without testing in a feature branch first. Join us on GovTeams for the next CKEditor information session.

In the new year, after a refreshing break over shutdown, here’s a sneak peak of the work currently prioritised on the GovCMS roadmap:

  • Helping agencies move from Swift mailer to Symphony mailer.
  • Continuing to support agencies to remove deprecated modules from each website. These include: panels, panelizer, video embed field and govcms8 modifiers
  • Supporting agencies with the Google Analytics 4 changes.
  • Discovery work continues for proposed new features and enhancements such as API, SSO & DXP. More information to come in the new year.