[consulting] preparing clients for Drupal 5 obsolesence

[Andy Hieb]

(sorry about the munged reply -- i'm subscribed to this list in digest
format, and don't know a clean way to reply to an individual thread...)

At Mon, 9 Mar 2009 20:02:02 -0500, Eric Goldhagen wrote:
> Many of our smaller non-profit clients can't afford to upgrade often 
> enough to keep up with the pace of drupal development.
> 
> Our solution has been to backport security patches that are relevant 
> to older versions. We did this for 4.6 when 5 came out, and have been 
> doing it with 4.7 since the release of 6. This gives folks the extra 
> time necessary to handle the cost and time of upgrades.

hmm, i'm really interested in this discussion in general, and this
approach in particular, Eric.  at what point do you find that the
backporting becomes more time and work than pushing through the upgrade?

more generally, i have my own approaches to maintaining Drupal sites and
i'd always assumed that everyone did things similarly.  :)   i've come
to realize that my particular business model and clientele dictate these
approaches and that other firms handle these issues quite differently.

i run a small design and development shop where i'm effectively the only
developer maintaining a handful of Drupal sites (as well as sites using
WordPress and custom PHP).  we, too, work for non-profits and
small/independent businesses with very small budgets.

my approach is to try hard to make sure our clients understand the
Drupal development process/schedule up front, and that they will be
required to upgrade their sites to keep up with core.  these sites keep
almost all customization at the theme level and rely on contrib modules
as much as possible (even with the contrib modules, i make sure clients
understand that they may complicate the upgrade process).

this position/clientele also makes me wish (and i do not mean to start a
flame war, but would be curious to hear others' latest thoughts on this)
that the Drupal core development cycle would move a bit more slowly!

 -- andy

-- 
[ Andy Hieb ]
[ Dtek Digital Media, Web Site & Video Production - http://dtek.net ]
[ The Media Spot, K-12 Media Education - http://themediaspot.org ]
[ 718 310 1612 ]