I’m not seeming much in the faq or here regarding Drupal. Both Drupal 7 and 8 are end of life in November of this year. What’s the plan for Drupal 9 support?
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Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. I see at another site that Drupal 7 is getting support until November of 2022, while Drupal 8 will sunset in November of 2021.
Since nearly the beginning of May First, we’ve supported the installation of Drupal via the control panel (starting with 4.6 if I’m not mistaken). We used a symlinks technique - so all installations are symlinked to a single directory. This conveniently allowed us to upgrade the single directory to upgrade all sites.
However, due to architectural changes in Drupal 8, this approach simply doesn’t work. As Drupal has become less popular, and plans for a new control panel have taken shape, we’ve been putting Drupal on hold with the vague notion that the new control panel should be designed to help members install modern versions of Drupal and Wordpress. Honestly, I’d really like to see us figure out how to support a static content generator.
All of this to say: we don’t have a plan for Drupal 9, and we should have a plan and timeline for generally supporting our members so they can easily build web sites using modern tools!
The real challenge with the Drupal/Wordpress style approach is keeping them updated. That’s one reason I like the static content generator approach - it’s less vulnerable to security vulnerabilities and it allows members to create a web site and then never update it again ever. If a project dies, you really can safely keep an acrhive online as long as you want.
I’m curious to get other thoughts and perspectives on how to meet this need.
I like the idea of static site generators (now that I’ve been introduced to the concept and done a bit of reading). It sounds like a generator would make Jamie and Jaime’s jobs easier, and I’m certainly on board with that. The downside for me is that it would seem to make CiviCRM unusable here unless we maintain our own CMSes. A quick search doesn’t reveal any plans for CiviCRM to adapt to static site generators.
Yes, you’re right - we’ll definitely need Drupal/WordPress or Joomla to run CiviCRM. And we’ll always make it possible to run the latest PHP applications (if nothing else, then with instructions on how to install by hand, but hopefully with something more user friendly).
On a tangential point, it’s not a bad thing to separate your CiviCRM installation from your main web site. While you lose some convenient integrations, you gain security and flexibility. When your are just running CiviCRM under Drupal, you can upgrade regularly without worrying about any third party modules breaking - you can focus just on providing the environment needed by CiviCRM. And, only people who need to use CiviCRM have logins.
So if you are running CiviCRM, using a static content generator for your main site won’t save you the trouble of maintaining a CMS, but at least it makes maintaining that CMS a little easier and more secure.