Our latest, 2 year, release plan is shown on the graphic. This details:
- Drupal core releases
- Ubuntu OS releases
- I-ntarsia customer requirements and feature requests
The key milestones are:
- Last release of 8.16.x in October 2019
- End of Life of 8.16.x in October 2020
- Last release of 8.18.x in October 2020
- First Release of 9.20.x in January 2021
- End of life of 8.18.x November 2021
So what does this mean for customers? We've set out the different scenarios in more detail below:
Existing Customer On I-ntarsia 8.16.x
The last release of I-ntarsia 8.16.x will be in October 2019. After that date, we will only be applying security updates to the 8.16 platform. We are recommending that customers upgrade as soon as possible to 8.18.x. As the Drupal versions are identical this upgrade should be very simple with only a nominal cost. We will shortly be contacting all 8.16.x customers to plan this upgrade.
Existing Customer On I-ntarsia 8.18.x
The 8.18.x platform will continue as our main platform release until at least January 2021 with Drupal 8.9 LTS at its core. It will continue to be supported until support for Drupal 8 ceases in November 2021. Once I-ntarsia 9.20.1 is released (January 2021 at the earliest) we will assess the complexity of the upgrade process for each customer site. Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 upgrades are intended to be as near to administrative as possible. Our preparation work in the later 8.xx releases and the work we do to maintain a standard platform lead us to believe that I-ntarsia customers will have a hassle-free migration path.
New Customer Before I-ntarsia 9.20.1
The gap between I-ntarsia 9.20.1 (January 2021 at the earliest and July 2021 at the latest) and the end of life of 8.18.x (November 2021) is artificially short because of some lower-level software dependencies ending their support lives. We have developed a commercial plan to ensure that customers undertaking a development in I-ntarsia 8.18.x are not disadvantaged by the relatively short, apparent, support life. All projects starting as of 1st. July 2019 will include a 9.20.1 planning element.
Why Bother?
If you have read all of the above you may be asking yourself "why bother?", or you may be thinking that other platforms don't need this type of planning? The simple answers are "security" and "they do!"
To meet obligations under privacy laws anyone who has a website has to continually assess that the measures taken are maintaining the level of protection of qualifying data required. That means keeping ALL of the software underneath a site or service up to date. We take this very seriously in the I-ntarsia platform as you can see from our release plan.