Below is an update on the WCMS 3 project, including changes to migration script bug fixes and planning for future co-op students.
WCMS 2 (Drupal 7) end-of-life support
IST will enter into a commercial support agreement with an approved Drupal 7 Long-Term Support vendor, that will extend the Drupal 7 end of life beyond the published November 2022 deadline. This means that WCMS 2 sites will remain in service and in good support until further notice. IST will reassess this commercial support agreement on a year-by-year basis and continue to extend, as necessary. At this point, the published end date for ‘end of paid commercial support’ is November 2025. This extension of Drupal 7 does not mean that IST will reduce the priority or urgency that we are placing on the WCMS 3 project. Rather, this option allows us, as a campus, the certainty for the continued operation and security of our WCMS 2 sites, while WCMS 3 functionality continues to be built and sites migrated.
WCMS 3 training
LEARN based training for WCMS 3, which is mandatory for all employees (including co-op students) to build and administer WCMS 3 sites, is live and available for use. The training includes the provisioning of an individual training site, for a period of 4 months (can be extended).
New WCMS 3 sites
Net new WCMS 3 websites are available for creation and use immediately.
Migrations from WCMS 2 – WCMS 3
IST is changing our approach to migration scripts and will be fixing bugs internally, within the WCMS team, rather than waiting for our external vendor to provide the fixes to us. This approach will allow a faster quality assurance process for the migration scripts, and to identify regression-related issues before committing the code and pushing it out for use across campus. With this new focused approach, we expect many bugs to be fixed in the coming months and released in Winter 2022.
We expect to treat the migration toolset as ‘complete’ around the same time FDSU theme development is complete (current estimate is Spring 2022). Complete migration tools will include some known issues that are not reasonable to automate given the fundamental change in Drupal technology. IST is creating remediation training for known issues with the migration scripts, as recently released in WCMS v3.0.6. There will be further iterations of the migration tools in the upcoming releases of WCMS 3 (expected to continue every 3 weeks), and the training will be adapted as we go. This training will be offered to employees and co-ops through the WCMS Drop-In Lab program (details to be announced shortly).
In addition, IST has recently identified approx. 290 sites that are good candidates to migrate now. IST will approach your areas to establish a timeline for migration of these sites. IST co-ops are ready and available to migrate and remediate known issues in the migration, before handing the site over to the Website Lead of your area for validation. In this way, we are taking advantage of development work already complete to move the project and migration forward iteratively. We expect this work will happen both in the Fall 2021 and Winter 2022 terms, and that the number of sites available for migration will expand as development progresses. We also encourage groups who currently have Fall term coops or who have already gone through the current coop hiring cycle for the Winter term, to enroll those coops in upcoming remediation training. Once trained, co-ops in your areas (if applicable) could complete the same remediation as the IST co-ops.
We will offer three models of site migrations:
- Manual migration of an existing WCMS site by requestor’s team (requestor to populate staging site)
- Partial migration of an existing WCMS site by IST co-ops (using migrations script and IST co-ops complete remediation)
- Partial migration of an existing WCMS site by requestor’s team (using migrations script and requestor completes remediation)
Our experience to date is that, even with known issues in the migration scripts, use of the scripts is 2-3x faster than doing a manual migration.
WCMS 3 development progress
Progress can be tracked here (updated every 3-4 weeks): High-level WCMS 3 development roadmap, a more detailed feature comparison between WCMS 2 FDSU and WCMS 3 FDSU as well as planned work in every 3-week sprint and release notes for every WCMS 3 version. Selected current priorities include finishing the remaining FDSU content types, expand/collapse functionality, and implementing authentication options for webforms.
What can I do now?
There is no pressure to begin to migrate sites at this time. IST is committed to providing WCMS 2 support until all sites are migrated to WCMS 3. While FDSU sites comprise ~85% of the WCMS, FDSU site development is not the end of the WCMS 3 project. After FDSU core development is complete, the other WCMS 2 themes need to be developed in WCMS 3, as well as any custom development from WCMS 2 that may need to be rewritten into WCMS 3.
Future term co-op students
At this time, we estimate that Spring 2022 will be the term where most FDSU websites can start to migrate using automated migration tools. IST will provide an update on this date in early January in advance of the first-round co-op student posting deadline on Wednesday, January 12, to confirm our projections, and to give the campus confidence about any co-op hiring that your area might choose to do for Spring term and beyond. IST will continue to hire WCMS migration co-ops to support the central process. As recently discussed, IST is also open to a larger central pool of co-op students, although more discussion is needed on this topic to ensure the right fit for various areas of campus.