As most of you are probably aware, Drupal 6 support formally ends on Feb. 24 - so all official support for D6 ends on that date. This has a few ramifications:
- As of that date the Drupal Security Team will no longer release new patches and will no longer send out security notices.
- Most module developers will stop suporting their Drupal 6 versions of modules altogether.
- At some point the security notices on D6 sites should start reporting "unsupported" status for everything.
- We will no longer be able to provide the same sort of support on D6 that we have in the past - in particular we cannot really guarantee any updates will occur.
We're still working on a formal stance on support for D6, since there's quite a lot of activity around the possiblity of a D6 LTS support model to be provided by a few commercial vendors. Being a small company with limited resources, we will not be one of those vendors.
Most likely what we will recommend for everyone using Drupal 6 at this point will be the following:
- If you keep a Drupal maintenance contract on your site we will make a best effort to apply any Drupal patches that become available through the D6 LTS support system - but we cannot make any promise that any Drupal security issues will be patched in a timely basis. We will only be applying patches for security issues, and only if they become publicly available. We are currently mulling over a price structure for this.
- If you prefer you can cancel your D6 support contract and your site will be on its own for any security updates. Frankly we do not expect a LOT of security patches will be ported to D6 in the future, but it's always possible something truly serious will pop up.
- If support for your D6 site is important to you and you do not believe you will be upgrading to D7 or D8 in the near future then we will be happy to recommend a support company that is doing D6 support on a commercial basis. This is likely to become expensive, and may in a lot of cases require that you host your site with the support company involved. However, if support long-term on D6 is important to you, subscribing to one of those services will help to fund back-porting of security fixes to D6 and will support the Drupal community.
In any case, we recommend that if you are on Drupal 6 that you make an attempt to upgrade to D7 or D8 as soon as possible. We will not be taking on any new support contracts for D6 sites as of today. We'll be glad to discuss the possible options with you whether or not you are currently a customer.