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= Drupal Support Timeline =

May First/People Link's [wiki:drupal_configuration shared Drupal installation] currently supports Drupal versions 4.6, 4.7 and 5. We cannot support all of these version indefinitely. Here's our plan for support of old versions of Drupal

== Drupal 4.6 ==

Drupal 4.6 should be phased out as soon as possible.  It has not been supported upstream for many months (as of March 2008 -- i can't find the end-of-life announcement to link, though), and despite [http://openflows.com/drupal the backported security fixes from openflows] probably contains outstanding vulnerabilities.  I recommend helping people upgrade their old 4.6 versions to 4.7 at least.

== Drupal 4.7 ==

Drupal 4.7 appears to have been dropped by upstream as well, since [http://drupal.org/drupal-6.1 6.1 is "stable" (as of 2008-02-27)] and [http://drupal.org/handbook/version-info upstream's policy is]:

 Supported versions for security patches and availability for download are the current stable release and one version previous.

MF/PL should phase drupal 4.7 out no later than the end of 2008, probably earlier.

== Drupal 5 ==

The Drupal 5 is the version we are installing automatically and supporting (version 5.7 at the moment of this writing - we will continue supporting the most recent update to version 5). This version is still active within the Drupal community and is still heavily supported by Drupal developers.

The change to Drupal 6, the newest version, is highly anticipated by MF/PL and we're monitoring the progress of this now released version. For information on that see below.

== Drupal 6 ==

Drupal 6 was released for production early 2008. While this version has many desirable improvements over version 5 and is completely stable at this point, we don't believe it's ready for default installation on our systems and are not installing it yet.

The problem is that, while the Drupal CMS is production ready, many of the critical Third Party modules it uses aren't. The main "obstacle" is Content Construction Kit, a module which is necessary in expanding new types of data (with new fields and customized functionality) and CCK, and its "cousin" module "Views" have not released Drupal 6 versions for production use yet. Without these, Drupal acts "out of the box" and that would restrict site development for many of our members.

These Third Party modules' developers are working now to get their releases ready for Drupal 6 and we expect production versions sometime in May or June of 2008. We will then wait for community testing and monitor bug and other issues as they are reported and resolved and when we think these modules are stable enough for use on our members' sites, we will switch over to installing 6 by default and supporting it.

This does ''not'' mean that you can't install 6 in your own directories and, in fact, we may decide to offer Drupal 6 installation as an option before Summer of 2008. But, for now, when you request a Drupal site in our shared system, Drupal 5 will be what you get.

We are closely monitoring these developments and will keep members up to date.