Drupal 6 End of Live

  • What does Drupal 6 EOL mean?
  • When is Drupal 6’s End-Of-Life (EOL)?
    • February 24th
  • Why is support for Drupal 6 being dropped by the Drupal project in the first place? (ie. why does our community even do this?)
    • What makes Drupal 6’s End-of-Life (EOL) different than previous ones (ie. Drupal 5)?
  • What, specifically, will happen after February 24th?
    • All D6 modules will be marked as “unsupported” on Drupal.org - which will mean the ‘update’ module will start telling you that ALL your modules are out-of-date
    • Also, the status information that the ‘update’ module uses could go away at any time - so, you’ll no longer be able to rely on that in general (myDropWizard or another vendor MAY create a replacement for the ‘update’ module…)
    • The Drupal security team will no longer be making Security Advisories (or coordinating security releases)
    • In general, most module maintainers will no longer pay attention to Drupal 6 issues and will stop making new releases
  • What should people with Drupal 6 sites do?
    • Archive the site, or
    • Plan upgrade, and
    • If you can’t upgrade by February 24th, buy Drupal 6 Long-Term Support from one of the “official” vendors:
      • https://www.drupal.org/node/2646980
  • What makes the “official” vendors special (vs. any other vendor)?
    • Get confidential information from Drupal security team
    • Agree to follow security team processes and release all security patches publicly
    • Were vetted by the Drupal security team
  • How will the Drupal 6 LTS work?
    • Same process as security team - but work done by vendors rather than security team
    • Will publish patches on the D6LTS project:
      • https://www.drupal.org/project/d6lts
    • Likely, but not 100% decided:
      • Announce new patches on the D6LTS issue queue
      • Make new Pressflow 6 releases with the Drupal core patches
  • So, can the community get this without working with a vendor?
    • Yes!
    • But each vendor only supporting those modules their customers depend on
    • And what about security issues that hackers find first?
  • What does myDropWizard.com do? And how is your offer different than the other vendors?
    • “myDropWizard.com provides 24/7 support and maintenance from Drupal experts for a fixed monthly fee. We keep your site online, up-to-date and secure!”
    • Our Drupal 6 Long-Term Support offer:
      • http://www.mydropwizard.com/drupal-6-lts
      • making security fixes
      • fixing bugs
      • performing one-off maintenance and support tasks on request
      • getting your site back online in the case of an outage, and
      • remediation if your site gets hacked.
    • Basically, keep your site online and secure until you’re ready to upgrade - and we can help with a D7 or D8 upgrade as well
  • Technical questions about how we do what we do?
  • Your offering includes a whole bunch of stuff! Why don’t you have a “security updates only” offering?