With the imminent release of Drupal 8, a lot of site owners will need to figure out when they should upgrade. This is not an easy question, and there are a ton of variables: the importance of the site, how much you need Drupal 8’s new features, and of course your budget… For most organisations with a limited budget however, the key factor will be how fast the required upgraded contributed modules will become available.
That is why we built d8upgrade.org, a free service for the Drupal community that sends out personalised reports with news about the upgrade status of the modules you use in your website. You won’t need to keep checking what modules have already been upgraded, we’ll do that for you. Where necessary we’ll even reach out to contrib module maintainers about their plans. This should help you avoid some of the gotchas you should watch out for when planning your upgrade.
How it works
We’ve tried to make the process as simple as possible. To get Drupal 8 upgrade status notifications for your site simply:
- Create an account (you can do so with a single click using your Linkedin or Google credentials)
- Start a site form for each of your Drupal sites
- Tell us what modules you are using (we’ve got detailed instructions, you don’t need to be an expert to do so).
A community service
We strongly believe in giving back to the community. In the past we’ve put a lot of time and effort into organizing community events like Drupalcon Szeged, DrupalDevDays Szeged, the Drupal CXO’s etc. We’ve also been contributing a lot of our work to the community, including a lot of work on contrib modules and of course WalkHub, development work that for the most part wasn’t paid by customers. So far we haven’t been able to do as much for Drupal 8 core, this is our way to do our part.
Working with contrib maintainers
We have built the site very lean and haven’t spent much time yet reaching out to people. We just wanted to get it out there and then see what feedback we get from site owners. Once we start seeing what modules our subscribers use, we’ll check issue queues and we’ll reach out to contrib maintainers to get a better insight into the expected timeline for their modules. I don’t want to make any promises before we get an idea about the reach of the program, but we would also like to give module maintainers a communication channel to site owners that need their modules. We think this might be useful for fundraising efforts and for testing purposes.
D8upgrade for consulting companies
We’ve done our best to keep the Pronovix branding as low key as possible. We do want to claim some credit, we are going to spend a lot of time on this project, but we wanted to make sure other consulting companies and freelancers wouldn’t feel bad about sending their customers to the site. We don’t want to steal your customers from you, especially not if you partner with us on this project. If you are interested in joining the effort, just let us know. We will be adding a partner page a bit later.
Other things you need to know
- The notification service is free
- You can add as many sites as you want
- Before Drupal 8 is released we will send monthly updates
- Once Drupal 8 is released you will be able to set more frequent notifications.
Give to Get
If you check out the site you’ll also see a link to a Give to Get page, this is a program we are going to be running with our customers. For every dollar they spend on community fundraising initiatives we endorse, we’ll give them a 2 dollar discount on their Drupal 8 project (up to 10% of their budget). I’ll write another dedicated blogpost to elaborate this a bit later.
What are you waiting for?
Add your site. It only takes a minute…
