Open Y Changes & Updates

Hello everyone!

I wanted to send out a note about some significant Open Y news and upcoming changes. We’ll reach out to each of our Y partners individually. However, this first message is meant to educate you on what changes are being required, why these changes are happening, and how we plan to support our Y partners to make sure you’re best set up for the future.

What is Changing?

Open Y is upgrading their entire code and platform to Drupal 9. Drupal 8 will no longer be supported after November 2021. This is called an “End of Life” for Drupal 8. The Open Y dev team will no longer build features, or test features in Drupal 8 Open Y sites, past November.

This means all Open Y websites are encouraged to upgrade to Drupal 9, along with the latest Open Y versions, by the end of this year.

Why Are Things Changing?

For the technical documentation of the upgrade reasons, Drupal released an article summarizing the reasons for updating to D9 (Drupal 9). Essentially, as we all know, technology moved forward. Open Y is built on top of Drupal. At the time that Open Y was being developed and scaled, Drupal 8 was the latest version.

When Drupal upgraded to 9, their development community (open source) will leave Drupal 8 features behind, and no longer fix bugs, features, etc. Similarly, because Open Y depends on Drupal, the Open Y development team and development partners will need to move forward with the Drupal community to D9.

Development time and money is not unlimited. And as such, supporting releases, bug fixes and features in 2 versions (8 & 9), is double the effort for the core devs, which doubles the cost of everything. Drupal 9, and the latest versions of Open Y built on D9, will get the priority for development time, energy & cost starting in November and moving forward.

Is There a Cost to Upgrade Our Site?

Yes.

There will be a cost associated with upgrading your site. This is due to the following basic development tasks that are required for a smooth upgrade:

• Copy your Live Website to a Development Website (yourYMCA.jwtechdesign.com)
• Perform the Upgrade on your Dev site (both Drupal & Open Y versions)
• Test the Dev website. When website is ready…
• Replace Live site with Dev site (requires downtime while website is copied to production)

We have performed a test upgrade of one of our Drupal 8 Open Y websites and are confident that we can streamline this process to save on cost, as much as possible.

However, there is no way to automate this upgrade for every website we support. Each site will need to go through the upgrade steps above, testing and re-rolling the upgrade to your live site. This is a manual process that all YMCAs – and all development partners – will be undertaking.

We are dedicated to making this work for each Y partner. In that vein, we’ll be offering 3 “upgrade packages” for you to choose from, based on your YMCA’s available budget & resources. We will go over those options for your upgrade package together, on our individual calls. But we wanted to give you a heads up that this upgrade will require development work, testing and support, outside your normal maintenance agreements.

Are You Required to Upgrade Your Site?

No.

You do not have to update your Drupal 8 Open Y website. Your website will continue to work and operate on the current version of Drupal & Open Y.

Please be aware, that if you decide to stay on the Drupal 8 Open Y platform, the underlying technology that your website is built on is no longer supported or maintained by an active developer community (neither Drupal’s Open Source community or Open Y’s dev team).

This means any bugs will not be fixed, features will not be actively created, and most importantly, security fixes & updates will not be provided. You would agree to assume those risks.

With that said, Drupal 8 is a stable platform. We can provide you with fixes, if and when they are needed. However, we will track that support as an hourly development service since the solutions are not coming from another team for us to implement, but rather we’ll be doing that development in-house.

When Do We Need to Update?

Drupal 8’s End of Life officially occurs on November 2, 2021. However, there is no immediate security risk in not making the upgrade by that date.

We recommend that you begin your update in Q4 of this year, so that by January 1, 2022, you have either begun or have finished your upgrade and are ready to take advantage of Drupal 9 improvements.

Again, we will reach out to all of our partners individually, to schedule a time to connect and talk about possible timelines that will work for you and your teams. Expect that email in the coming days! Being that this is a larger change than the normal “point release” and that it will require some development resources, we wanted to give you a heads up as much as possible, heading into the new quarter and new year.

If you have any question, would like further clarification, or would like to go ahead and schedule your meeting with us so that you’re first in line for the upgrades, feel free to reach out! You’ve got my email, and you can always find me on Slack.

Thanks for being such wonderful partners. We’re proud to be working with you on your website for a successful present & future online.