Anoop John

Drupal 6 will be maintained till the release of Drupal 8. Drupal 8 release is expected to happen towards the end of 2013. The current stable branch Drupal 7 will be maintained till the release of Drupal 9 (probably 2015). If you are running a production site on Drupal 6 then you will probably have to start looking at upgrading the site by the end of this year.

Upgrading Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is supposed to be a straightforward process but there are certain things you have to be careful about when you upgrade Drupal. The following list outlines the different steps you will have to follow to upgrade your non-mission-critical small Drupal site.

With Drupal 8 in the works a lot of Drupal 6 sites are currently upgrading to Drupal 7. We get quite a few queries on Drupal upgrades and almost everybody asks for a fixed price estimate for the process. In theory Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 upgrade process is an automated process (except for the upgrade of theme and custom modules) and all you have to do is to take the site through a set of standard steps for the upgrade. However upgrades don't always work like that.

A lot of clients come to us asking for running Drupal updates on their sites. However almost everybody asks for a fixed price estimate for the process. There is however a challenge in this because updates would mostly run without problems but you might run into a problem or two once in a while. We have a standard and safe process of running Drupal updates but the safe practices followed in the process would take considerably longer time than blindly running updates on the live site.