Q1. Why are CERN websites moving to cloud-based servers?
To align with a general transition in CERN’s Web Frameworks towards industry standards. The new Drupal infrastructure will be served on the same underlying technology as other types of websites at CERN.
Q2. Why are CERN websites moving from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9?
The Drupal community will no longer support Drupal 8 from 2 November 2021 onwards. This means continuing to use Drupal 8 is a security risk for CERN, so we need to move to Drupal 9.
Q3. Haven’t we only just moved from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8?
CERN’s main website <home.cern> moved from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 in 2018 and CERN’s other Drupal 7 websites followed. Rest assured that the move from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is much easier than the Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration. In fact, it’s not a migration, but an upgrade.
Q4. Why are you informing me about this now?
Websites can be previewed in the Openshift cloud-based servers from w/b 18 October, so you can check if your website is Drupal 9 compliant. The IT infrastructure team and IR web team have been working throughout 2021 to prepare CERN themes and modules for Drupal 9. In addition, the Drupal community have made many additional Drupal 8 modules Drupal 9 compliant.
For the majority of cases, they have done the work for you, you just need to check your site.
In rare cases, a custom module or theme that you have used may not exist in Drupal 9. If this is the case, we encourage you to use the Drupal tools website, Zoom workshops or Drupal 9 forum to help you decide how best to proceed.
Q5. In which site I should apply my module changes for Drupal 9?
Regarding your module changes, you can test them on your preview sites (.webtest.cern.ch), but please note that after moving the production sites to the cloud those changes will be deleted. The preview sites are temporary.
To keep your changes, you’ll need to apply them to your live site (.web.cern.ch). Once your site is moved to the cloud you can request for a new test site (Record Producer - CERN Service Portal: easy access to services at CERN) to test your changes. Upgrading modules on your live site is dangerous.