Georgia Tech Drupal News

PHP.net will end support for PHP 7.1 in December 2019. OIT Web Hosting will be ending support for PHP 7.1 on December 2nd, 2019. In preparation for this upgrade, Web Hosting will be making the following changes:

1. From today Aug 26th, all newly provisioned sites will be created with PHP 7.3.
2. On October 1st, any site on Plesk21 still running on PHP 7.1 will be transitioned to PHP 7.2
3. On October 8th, all site on all remaining servers still running PHP 7.1 will be transitioned to PHP 7.2

To minimize the impact, we are updating existing sites to PHP 7.2, while we will provision a new site to the most current version of PHP (PHP 7.3). We strongly encourage the testing and early transition to PHP 7.2 or PHP 7.3 (preferred) before our major update in October.

Dates to Know

• Monday, August 26 - new site requests will provision with PHP of 7.3. 

• Tuesday, October 1 - convert all sites on Plesk21 on PHP 7.1 to PHP 7.2.

• Tuesday, October 8 – convert all remaining sites on all Plesk servers on PHP 7.1 to PHP 7.2.

Please Note: You will be able to revert back to PHP 7.1 while testing PHP 7.2 and 7.3 between October 1st and December 2nd. The December 2nd transition deadline cannot be extended; it is critical that your application be upgraded to ensure its continued security.

Actions

We strongly recommend appropriate testing and moving to PHP 7.2 or 7.3 as soon as possible. Before October, if one or more of your application environments is currently using PHP 7.1, we encourage you to request the upgrade by submitting the hosting plan upgrade form to avoid a forced upgrade. 

Note: Even if you will be able to select PHP 7.2 subscription on the form, we strongly encourage you to choose PHP 7.3. Since PHP 7.3 will have a longer support.

Questions?

For more information about this PHP upgrade, please see the PHP 7.2 release notes and the PHP 7.3 release notes.

If you have questions or would like additional information, please submit a Web Hosting ticket.

Georgia Tech’s primary supported content management system (CMS) is Drupal. The majority of websites at the Institute using Drupal are currently on Drupal 7.

Since Drupal 8’s release, there has been increased interest in transitioning to Drupal 8 across the Institute. Georgia Tech Information Technology and Institute Communications (IC) would like to share additional information and recommendations on this for campus.

The Drupal 8 platform is a significant departure from Drupal 7 and is, at this point, only recommended if you have a web developer on your team who is comfortable taking on a project like this.

In particular, there are a few roadblocks which make this more complex in the short term:

• Composer: Composer, a dependency manager, is a key tool needed for successful management of Drupal 8. The current Plesk hosting environment that the majority of sites at Georgia Tech reside on does not easily allow for site deployment using Composer. Georgia Tech Information Technology is reviewing this situation. In addition, there is a project to seek a new hosting solution for the Institute.

• Drupal 8 editor: There is not currently a strong out-of-the-box solution available to use as an editor tool in Drupal 8. The IC web dev team will likely need to use an existing solution as a base, customizing it to meet our needs. This project will require research, effort, and testing to execute properly.

• Training for site admins: Related to the above, the editing experience for website admins will be different in Drupal 8. It is in the Institute’s best interest that those in charge of their unit’s web presence be well-equipped to do so.

Georgia Tech Information Technology and Institute Communications are tentatively planning to have some of these barriers to entry addressed by November 2019. We recommend that any units without an experienced web developer or the funds to hire a third-party agency to execute such a project hold on transitioning to Drupal 8 until after that time.

In the meantime, the new Georgia Tech “Tech Gold” branded website header and footer theme is available for Drupal 7. The WordPress team is similarly working on updates to align with the new branding as well.

Prior to the Fall, Georgia Tech Information Technology and Institute Communications will work with campus web developers to identify and outline training opportunities for campus website admins and draft a recommended path to transition to Drupal 8.