Drupal GovCon is this week. The conference aims to highlight what is new and applicable for the public sector on the Drupal content management system. One of Drupal’s biggest backers – Acquia will be at the conference highlighting their move to adopt Drupal 8 and make it available for customers.
Drupal 8 is still in beta but according to Angie Byron, Director of Community Development at Acquia, the new version exhibits enough consistency and development that early adopters should feel confident making the move.
“A lot of people in the Acquia community were starting to look at Drupal 8 as they work through website upgrade plans. We’re part of the core team building Drupal 8, and we feel confident that we can support websites on the new version,” Byron said.
Drupal is an open source content management system supported by a community of developers including Acquia. The new release builds in a lot of the most popular features used in the Drupal community as part of its core functionality instead of as add-ons.
Drupal 8 provides a new content authoring experience, including a fully responsive design capability. Drupal 8 also provides an API approach to content delivery, allowing content to be made available everywhere, including websites, mobile devices, native applications, digital screens, and the Internet of Things.
“I think the biggest jump will be for people who are using Drupal 6. The upgrade to Drupal 8 makes a lot of sense because there are significant security fixes and you’re going to see a lot more functionality,” Byron adds.
For those considering the upgrade, both data and code migration will have to be part of the process. “This isn’t going to be something you can do in a weekend. Drupal 8 has porting tools, which will be especially helpful for moving over old modules, but users will have to be prepared for a larger process to get the upgrade done if they are moving over from much older versions.”
So far, there are about 400 sites already live on Drupal 8. “That’s been a pretty good test group in terms of spotting any critical issues. I’m hopeful we can get to a full release before the end of the year,” Byron said.
