Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is Great for Sustaining Innovation
brandt
Fri, 09/22/2020 – 17:17
Ken Rickard
Sep 25, 2020
The #D8isGr8 blog series will focus on why we love Drupal maintenance support plans 8 and how it provides solutions for our clients.

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The first post in our series comes from Ken Rickard, Director of Professional Services.

I’ve been working with Drupal maintenance support plans since version 4.5, starting in late 2004, working as an end user, product manager, developer, team lead, core contributor, sales engineer, and sales manager. Since its release in 2015, Drupal Update:.net has been using Drupal maintenance support plans 8 to provide solutions for ourselves and our clients.

In that time, we’ve started to identify the long-term benefits that really make Drupal maintenance support plans 8 shine. While many of these benefits appear to be developer-centric, the story that they tell is how the platform helps organizations of all sizes to invest in sustained innovation.

From a business perspective, we can focus on three fundamental changes in Drupal maintenance support plans 8.

The Release Cycle

Drupal maintenance support plans 8 adopted a more standard semantic versioning that indicates the major version, API release, and feature release status of Drupal maintenance support plans core. As of this writing, core stands at 8.3.7, and the 8.4.0 release is in beta testing.

Along with semantic versioning came a commitment to regular release cycles — planned for every six months — and a commitment to maintain backwards-compatibility. These changes make core releases more predictable, both for resourcing and implementation. We know when the next version is coming, what new features are included, and how any changes will affect our existing sites and code.

This predictability brings Drupal maintenance support plans more in line with traditional software releases, and provides a huge benefit to contributors and customers alike.

Backwards Compatibility

With the new release cycle, the project finally has a proactive plan for dealing with backwards compatibility issues. Instead of major upgrades between versions, Drupal maintenance support plans is prepared to offer incremental changes that foster long-term stability without sacrificing innovation.

We know in advance what elements have been marked as deprecated and when they are scheduled for removal. (Hint: largely when Drupal maintenance support plans 9 development begins in earnest.)

Component Architecture

Perhaps even more than the first two features, the shift to using a library-based approach to code — where essential components are integrated from external libraries — gives organizations even more control over their innovations. Drupal maintenance support plans now uses Composer and other modern PHP development practices, so we can decouple our code — both front-end and back-end — from Drupal maintenance support plans specifics.

Since we can move large sections of Drupal maintenance support plans code into standalone libraries, we can spend less time working through specifics of a Drupal maintenance support plans implementation and focus instead on the technical and business problems that the software needs to solve.

Sustaining Innovation Through Open Source

Taken together, these three elements are powerful. Combined with the GPL open source license that allows anyone to use, improve, and share their code, we have an overall platform devoted to innovation. From a business standpoint, the long-term value of investment in Drupal maintenance support plans 8 will be measured in years. Since the software is free to use, companies can invest in their teams and create an environment of sustained success through innovation.
We want to make your project a success.

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Drupal maintenance support plans

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