When should I start using Drupal 8?

And as ever, there's no simple answer. When's right for you to start using Drupal 8 depends on your current platform, your business needs and your appetite for investing in your site.

At Deeson, we're still recommending to clients that all new build websites use Drupal 7. And we don't see this changing until at least six months after Drupal 8 has been released, which itself won't be for a few months. 

That's because for production builds of live sites, we need to be confident in both the core code and, probably more importantly, the suite of modules we use to deliver great Drupal 7 experiences for end-users and site administrators. It'll take some time for these modules to all be updated ready for Drupal 8 following the official release, particularly large sets of modules such as Commerce.

The Drupal community's commitment is to support the current and previous versions of Drupal - which means Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 are currently supported by the community for security patches, compatibility upgrades and the like.

When Drupal 8 is released, support for Drupal 6 websites will cease officially after three months. Support for Drupal 7 will continue until Drupal 9 is released - and that's likely to be a good few years away yet.

So in our view Drupal 7 is currently the best choice for clients building new websites on Drupal right now.

That'll change sometime in late 2015 or early 2016 when Drupal 8 and the surrounding code ecosystem matures enough to be ready for large scale production sites. When that time comes we'll be recommending all new builds are delivered using Drupal 8.

But if you're already running a website that's using Drupal 6 then we'd recommend you start thinking about budget for an upgrade to Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 in the next two years.

Most businesses and organisations won't want to take the risk of running a website using an unsupported content management system for any significant length of time - and it's certainly not something we'd recommend or endorse.

That's not to say we're not already road testing Drupal 8. At Deeson we enjoy playing with technology to see what it can do - and we're already giving Drupal 8 a thorough workout behind the scenes.

We're really excited about the potential for what can be done with Drupal 8. You can read more about its benefits for technologists and marketers alike here.