On June 29, 2021, we released WCMS 3.0.0. I’m incredibly proud of our team for getting this out the door. It may seem like we’ve been working on this new version of the WCMS forever, but that’s because this rebuild has required three solid years of work. We started working on WCMS 3 in July of 2017 before pausing in June 2018 and picking work up again in earnest from May of 2019.
WCMS through the years
Looking back on it, though, we’re actually many years into the WCMS project. WCMS 1.0 was tagged in November of 2011, and the current release, 2.9.1, was tagged in January of this year. That’s nine solid years of work – potentially more, as the first tag isn’t when actual work began.
Going from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 meant that basically everything had to be rebuilt from scratch. It is perhaps no surprise that, in trying to compress nine years of work into three, we missed our original deadlines and shipped with an incomplete feature set. However, what was shipped does cover many use cases (we ran several surveys that helped prioritize functionality) and has allowed sites to begin launching in WCMS 3.
Supporting the move to WCMS 3
Automated migration tools – which were originally slated to ship several months after the release – were developed concurrently with the project. There were some challenges with the first runs, which has meant that only a small number of sites have gone through the tools, but we expect them to be resolved shortly and additional migrations to begin.
Training materials were also developed concurrently with the project. It’s incredibly challenging to write training for a moving target, and I’d like to thank the training and support team for all the effort they’ve put in so far – and continue to put in – developing and updating training materials and a training course. Documentation is available now; some logistics for the training course need to be sorted out but will be available as soon as possible afterwards. Everything will be continually updated to reflect the current state of the product.
What’s to come
Rest assured that the 3.0.0 release does not mean that we think we’re done. We have to move to Drupal 9 before the end of the year (which will be much, much simpler and will not require extensive rewriting). We are aiming to have close to everything that is currently available in WCMS 2 “FDSU” sites available in WCMS 3 by the end of September, and over the following several months we will switch our focus to functionality from single page, publication, and conference sites.
Thank you
Finally, I want to thank you for exhibiting patience and understanding. I know it can be a frustrating time as we continue our journey to a full-featured WCMS 3. We share those frustrations but will be working hard to ship new releases approximately every 3 weeks for the foreseeable future, bringing improved theming, bug fixes, and additional functionality.
