Drupal 9 June update

Friday 26 June 2020

Drupal released Drupal 9 on 4 June 2020. We are currently working on the GovCMS Drupal 9 Distribution as a priority. We will release the new distribution once we are sure it meets all GovCMS requirements.

We suggest you start planning now to ensure you have the budget and resources available to move your website to Drupal 9. If you’ve thought about auditing your website to remove content you no longer need or you’re thinking of merging multiple websites, now is a good time.

Do you have a SaaS Drupal 7 website?

Drupal 7 will be end of life by 28 November 2022

If you have a Drupal 7 website you will now have extra time to plan for Drupal 9. On 24 June 2020 Drupal announced it will extend end of life for Drupal 7. This decision was made to give website owners 12 extra months to recover from the impact of COVID-19 on budgets and businesses.

We will not be accepting any new Drupal 7 websites on the GovCMS platform from July 2020.

You will need to move your SaaS Drupal 7 websites onto the GovCMS Drupal 9 Distribution by November 2022. You have two options:

  • If you have the budget now, you can rebuild your website on Drupal 8 and update to Drupal 9 when the GovCMS Distribution is available, or
  • You can wait to rebuild your website on Drupal 9 when the Drupal 9 GovCMS Distribution is available

Do you have a SaaS Drupal 8 website?

Drupal 8 will be end of life by November 2021

This means you will need to move your SaaS Drupal 8 websites onto the GovCMS Drupal 9 Distribution by November 2021.

We will do some trial upgrades ahead of releasing the GovCMS Drupal 9 Distribution. There will likely be a few cases where some remediation work is required. You will have lots of time to test the upgrade of your Drupal 8 websites and arrange to have any deprecated code fixed before the upgrade is deployed to your live site.

Do you have a PaaS website?

You can use Drupal 9 now. If you want to use the GovCMS Distribution on Drupal 9 you will need to wait until we release it. We would love to hear about your lessons learned when you move your website to Drupal 9. The GovCMS community will greatly benefit from your experience.