The Drupal.org D7 upgrade launch is confirmed. Today is Monday, 28th of October, we have 0 launch blocking issues and performance tests are looking fine. Therefore, we are going to launch on Thursday, October 31st, 2013.

What will the launch process be like?

Drupal.org will be down for approximately 24 hours during deployment. It will be replaced by a static page with a download link for the latest Drupal release available. Sub-sites will stay online, but with user logins disabled. Both updates.drupal.org and ftp.drupal.org will stay online. drush make / dl will work fine, update status module as well.

We will start deployment around 15:00 UTC on October 31st. We expect the site to be back up by 15:00 UTC on November 1st.

We realize this will be a significant inconvenience for users who rely on Drupal.org, and will try to minimize downtime as much as possible.

What if there are problems? Do you have a backup plan?

Yes, we do. If we encounter significant problems during migration, we will roll back to the Drupal 6 version of Drupal.org and restore with a backup made right before migration started.

How can I find out what’s going on during deployment?

UPDATE: We've finished running studies for this initial period. Analysis and findings now published.

Usability studies are one of the best ways to keep improving Drupal 8. We want to speak with people who create or edit content on the web to take part in a UX research study to help improve Drupal 8.

This study will help us learn how content creators move between admin and non-admin interfaces. Editing content is a key part of working with Drupal, so understanding this interaction is essential.

After a month-long Community QA, we are getting ready to deploy Drupal.org D7 upgrade. During the last couple of weeks we were limiting the number of ‘to-do before launch’ issues to those that are absolutely essential. Currently our launch blocker list consists of the 12 open issues.

We took a look at the upcoming Drupal events to find a quiet week, which won’t interfere with major camps and sprints, and..

Launch date

If by Monday, 28 of October, launch blocker issue is down to 0, we plan to deploy the Drupal.org D7 upgrade on Thursday, 31 of October.

If by Monday, 28 of October, the launch blocker issue count is higher than 0, we will have to postpone deployment for a few weeks.

What will the launch look like?

Drupal.org will be down for approximately 24 hours during deployment. It will be replaced by a static page with a download link for the latest Drupal release available. Sub-sites will stay online, but with user logins disabled. We realize this will be a significant inconvenience for users who rely on Drupal.org, and will try to bring it up as soon as possible.

If you have been on Drupal.org today, you may have noticed something interesting near the bottom of the page. At some point during the past 24 hours, the millionth user joined Drupal.org!

It is tempting to overlook those statistics at the bottom of the page because our eyes tend to skip over what they see repeatedly. But it’s worth taking a moment to think about it. 228 countries. 181 languages. And counting.

Congratulations to Mortendk and Matthew Saunders, our newly elected Directors at Large, representing the community on the board of the Drupal Association. Please join me in thanking all the candidates who put themselves forward to stand for election.