Speculating Beyond Available Evidence - Updating to Drupal 7 and a Look at D8

Drupal is a content management system that many organizations, including law schools, have embraced to maintain their websites. Much of the popularity of Drupal stems from how customizable all aspects of the system are, with hundreds of premade themes that dictate the look and feel of a website, as well as 20,000 community created add-ons (contributed modules). Despite using the same core software, almost every Drupal site has a unique identity with a host of modules helping that site deliver a precise experience.
 
This, unfortunately, leads to a less popular aspect of Drupal: updating the core software. While new versions bring new features to the core functionality, it also introduces incompatibilities with previously installed modules. Since most sites are unique in composition, upgrading, testing, and fixing a site is a unique challenge. This very task is now imminent for all law schools using Drupal for their web sites. As major versions of Drupal Core are released, a version becomes unsupported. The newest version Drupal 8 (or D8) had its feature freeze in December of 2012, and the code freeze is expected in July 2013. While the date for its final release has yet to be announced, it is a fact that Drupal 6, the de facto version for many law schools, will become unsupported soon.
 
There are two focuses in this session:
The first focus is to discuss upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7. Version 7 has been available since January of 2011, but Drupal 6 in use since 2008 remains widely popular with law schools that have chosen Drupal for their law school’s site. The session will outline tools, techniques, and tips for making the upgrade transition and testing compatibility.
 
The second focus is to preview features planned for Drupal 8. While a lot can change between now and the code freeze/ultimate release, the core initiatives for the new version are well defined. The session will look at changes to configuration management, HTML5, layouts, mobile, multilingual, views in core, and web services, as well as other features planned in the near future of interest to law schools.

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