Drupal Long Term Support (LTS)

Drupal Long Term Support (LTS) project facilitates long term support of Drupal versions through patches. Its goal is to both help support older versions of Drupal and generate interest in official long term support.

Priorities

• Backport of security patches from supported Drupal core versions.
• Backport of security patches for unsupported Drupal contrib modules.
• Information about security issues with past Drupal Core and Contrib.

Structure

• Module code base would contain patches.
• Module code base might contain functionality to find or see if patches already applied.
• Issue queue for known security issues.

Resources

• groups.drupal.org LTS Group

When a Drupal core version such as 5.x is no longer supported an LTS branch can be started for that core version.

Ultimately long(er) term support of Drupal core versions will not work without great community support and infrastructure beyond a contrib module. This project is simply leveraging the Drupal project infrastructure for LTS, starting with Drupal 5, until such support has more community support and an appropriate infrasctructure.

While cutting edge commercial sites have less of an interest in LTS; Non profits, universities, and other institutions have more interest in LTS because they often host their own sites, have security policies, and have sites which need to be maintained, but lack resources to upgrade to new drupal versions.

Some recent shifts in Drupal development should make it easier to backport patches to past versions: increased simpletest coverage, more apis, and more object oriented code.

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