 So today, we did have another presenter about having a few issues trying to log in. So my name is Achille with Solstice Digital, and today I've got two of the four from the Teen High End Project. So I'd like to welcome Joseph Zau, technical lead, and Alistair O'Neill, the product owner for GovCMS. Now if we can get Yvonne Norris, who's the project lead for the project team, we'll see if she can get on. Otherwise, yes, welcome to the panel today. As you may be aware, Solstice Digital are the service providers for GovCMS. And we're the first ones to see and triage many of the questions that come in through the GovCMS service desk. So we thought we'd take this opportunity to take a quick chat to the project team here and ask some of the burning questions coming in about T9, as it's probably everything that's around D9 at the moment. And I'll start off with some of the common questions we see coming through the service desk. And we'll also have some time at the end to answer some live questions. So please just feel free to post in the discussion. And we'll try and answer those questions towards the end. So I'm just going to dive on in. If I can just go to the slides. Excellent. OK, so I guess this is the first one for you, Alistair. So when does Drupal 7 have end-of-life? Thanks, Kil. So Drupal 7 is one of the longer ones from a lifetime perspective. It's not actually going into life until the end of 2022. So that one's a bit longer in the tooth for people. Not exactly sure why Drupal made that decision. But those who are sort of working in a Drupal 7 space have a bit more time up their sleeves when thinking about redeveloping a website or building something new. Excellent, excellent. So I guess coming to the next one. Working. Good. And of course, with this one, Drupal 8 is end-of-life sooner than Drupal 7. A bit of an interesting decision that was made. Nonetheless, with that in mind, we've got options in that space going forward. But Drupal 8 is looking to be end-of-life come the end of next year, so 2021. So luckily from a Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 move, it's a bit more simple and straightforward. So if anything, we probably don't need a huge amount of lifetime for Drupal 8 when thinking about Drupal 9, whereas previously with Drupal 7, there's a bit more time up our sleeves because there are architectural changes and other things under. Sorry, I'm not sure if that's just me. I think I'll see you dropped out for a second, but hopefully you're still there. OK, so I've got another one. Yeah, I'm hoping so. Yeah, it might be a little bit more controversial here. So we've got this question about why is Drupal 8 end-of-life before Drupal 7? I think you touched on that a bit earlier. Yeah, so as far as I've been led to believe and as I will subsequently pass on, Drupal 8 is very much the base for what Drupal 9 becomes. So with that thinking, instead of having to have three distributions running alongside each other, the ability to drop eight out earlier should hopefully be a good thing. And there shouldn't be a huge amount of change for people who are already using Drupal 8 with going to nine. Whereas seven, a bit more time-up slaves, figuring out whether eight will work for you, whether nine will work for you, or any sort of planning you have to do. So I'm taking it as a positive thing. Excellent, thank you. So I guess the next question is really as hotly anticipated as a Hollywood movie, when is Drupal 9 going to be ready? When is Drupal 9 going to be ready? That's a very good question. So what we're looking at, at least from the GovCMS site, and we're working hard behind the scenes at the moment and Joseph can attest to that. He's in the middle of all of that. We're hoping to have a Drupal 9 product ready on GovCMS around April, possibly made around that area next year. So all the work that Joseph and the team are doing behind the scenes is getting our current Drupal 8 product ready for that nine release. If you've got anything you wanna touch on there, Joseph. Yeah, so I mean like, yes, I mean like GovCMS 9 is currently under active development or update more literally. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get to the technical bits and pieces a little bit down the tracks. Okay, so hot question there is when should I upgrade by? It's a very good question. So I suppose it depends on what you're working on at the moment, what you're working with and obviously things like budget, time frames and a lot of other little considerations in there as well. If we consider about sort of customers that we have on our GovCMS platform and we've probably got four categories there. We've got people who work with Drupal 7 at the moment. We've got people who work with Drupal 8 at the moment and then we've got Sass and Pass under both of those. So when we think about some of those upgrades those with eight, like I've already sort of attested to there's an easier upgrade path. So when we think about people who work in that sort of at eight Sass space then it should be a lot less painful, should be very simple and hopefully not a huge amount of overhead in that space. Well, that's what we're planning for there anyway. For those in those sort of pass spaces for eight once again, if you want to be out on the bleeding edge that's there's the opportunity to do so in that space. So if you want to start in that space and we've got some customers who are testing and planning in that space at the moment then they're free to go ahead. With of course seven and whether it's Sass or Pass I mean, I think there's the broader planning that architecture will change in differences between Drupal there is really important to obviously consider and it's a real opportunity to take stock of everything you've got already. So even if you don't necessarily have a budget or don't have hard firm deadlines yourself internally for any of those sort of things it's an opportunity to kick those things off now and review or stocktake what you have whether it's content, whether it's functionality and of course there's certain lifespans for sites. So some things might be able to be decommissioned some might not, some might need a bigger project or a bigger bucket of funding to deliver. So if anything having that idea to sort of kick off now and think about where to go is really important. And then from that we do have some deadline material that we've put up on the GovCMS website for a broader sort of roadmap. But if anything start thinking now and of course the sooner you can kick those things off or once again coming and talking to us about sort of direction in that space. There's a lot of how long as a piece of string. More than happy to take a lot of questions off line about those things against specific projects. So that's a good point to follow on after after this conversation. No, you've made some really good points I asked you I suppose especially about planning for it. So even things like content audits or content reviews things that you can kind of do now in preparation will be pretty ideal. You also touched on budgets I guess that's one thing that agencies should probably consider is the timeframe it takes to get budgets in order even if you don't quite know yet. You know that lead time to get a budget to then actually do the upgrade has to be allowed for considering the short timeframe so next year. Okay, excellent. So let's see if it's going. So I guess this is the next one. What are my upgrade options? Now also obviously there's what's your take on the SaaS versus PaaS approach here and how GovCMS sees this. So very good one. There's a couple of things here and of course it touches to that sort of idea of planning and thinking about where you need to go with your products. With this in mind obviously for those who are in that sort of PaaS space I think there's a bit of thinking that for those who have got that more control there that they can sort of well channel their own destiny to a degree. But of course that's not always the case. From a SaaS perspective I think that really does drive back to the do we have budget could we account for a budget? How complex is the material that we're trying to move over? Is it feasible at the moment? Is it feasible later in the piece? Are we going to need help? And are we going to need help from developers? Are we going to need help from other agencies? Are we going to need help from GovCMS? Lots of questions there. For the most part because of the differences between seven and eight it's probably a really good opportunity with seven to go back, do that stock take and then plan out to almost build out from scratch. Now there's obviously some migrating options that allow content and material to move over. I think one of the products that actually yourself Salsa have put together is Merlin. I haven't used it myself but I believe it was part of a project last year before I joined GovCMS in helping to migrate additional sites to the GovCMS platform. So that's the fact that you guys have open sourced that as well gives an opportunity to move some of that migration along there. Whether that's going to work for everyone and once again from a skill set but for the most part there is going to be a need to consider to a degree to start from scratch with moving from seven to eight. So that's what Salsa will pass. Yeah. I'm looking forward to hearing from you Joseph and whether or not the chat has a different view on that either. Yeah, so it's like I totally agree it's like for the currently for triple seven site it's definitely another upgrade to eight or nine. Eight well need a full rebuild. So it is time to think and start a plan. So and just to go back so the reason I suggest that a lot of that comes from my own background. So for those of you who haven't had the joy of meeting discussing emailing phone calls with me as of yet I've actually moved from the finance web team which also sits in departments such as GovCMS and we ran through a project to move several sites from seven to eight in that last financial year. So that's exactly why I sort of attest to that sort of thinking because it gave us an opportunity to go back and review old content, go back to business areas and a lot of those sort of things that don't necessarily need a whole lot of technical people on board to do it but just the ability to kick off that process and then line up later on with budgets, planning and all of those sort of things. So I mean that's the school of thinking I come from there anyway. Excellent, thank you. That's really detailed. Now we've got only a few minutes left so I might have to speed through I think we're only about halfway through the presentation but we'll try and get through quickly. So I think the seven and eight will be similar. What is my responsibility as an agency I guess? What does the agency have to do versus what GovCMS might be able to help with? Very good question. And for a lot of those conversations that we're having at the moment with people on SAS there is a mix of people in our audiences that are asking exactly that question. Some are more than happy to run off and do their own work or even in my own background we had the skill in the house to be able to do that outside of leveraging any need for GovCMS bar obviously setting up new environments. With that in mind, obviously while we look after infrastructure and things like that and I don't wanna put everything back on people but there is thinking that if you are looking after a website or trying to drive a direction for something that there is some ownership there and some planning ahead. That sort of advent of the idea of someone who was a product owner and now guilty myself in the technical space for GovCMS is that there is a need to plan and think out in those spaces and consider the life cycle of your products anyway. So there is a fair bit of lifting internally for that but at the same time, if people are getting stuck I do wanna have those conversations I wanna know about those problems now because if there is something we can potentially assist with we have to know about it. Excellent, excellent. So just quickly going through so I guess this will be similar for seven and eight but what influences the complexity of migration from? I know seven will probably be a bit more of a journey versus eight but maybe you can just touch on lightly what these influences might be. Look functionality, big one. Obviously there's been some changes and as I keep going back to architectural changes between seven and eight obviously what your site or what your product does. If it's a very simple brochure where sort of product then for the most part it's potentially theming it's bringing in content it's making sure that your information and your presentation is validated all of those sort of things. Obviously on the other end of that sort of scale how much data are you bringing in? What sort of tools, products do you have extended to that? So really having an idea of what your product does do you still need to maintain and do that material? And then going from that of course once again lots of how long is a piece of string but once again really came to talk to people about their projects and any concerns that they're having. Excellent. So I might throw this one to Joseph. So what happens if I have to upgrade or whatever happens if I upgrade to Drupal eight first? This is a really good question. So it's like as we can understand is like if you have a Drupal seven site I'll upgrade to GALCMS eight or nine. It requires a full rebuild. And however, if you are already a Drupal eight site the process of moving to Drupal nine should be relatively easy. And our team we are working hard in this area since we don't want to maintain three distributions. Yeah, of course. Okay, so good, excellent. Now I might skip through a couple of these questions. I'm going to jump to something which I think might be a bit more of a hot topic is I think we're almost getting there because there's a similar to we have a seven. So I think they're going to be very similar. This one here is okay. So Drupal eight says what improvements can I make? Of course, I mean like we are encouraging people to contribute to GALCMS and not only to GALCMS repository through GitHub but also site and the developers can also contribute to the contribute modules which includes inside the current distribution for enhancement or improvement. We are encouraging the developers to do more not only GALCMS but also the country modules. So yeah, I guess so the eight and the nine jump not as extreme as the seven to nine. So I guess still contributing to the modules will actually help going forward. One example I can give is like for example, this import which is being used for a lot of GALCMS seven sites and however it's still in the beta. So if the developer can contribute this module and make it production only we could add this module into distribution. Excellent, okay. So I'm going to jump into Paz now and this is probably one for Alice too. So just jumping into Paz, what is my upgrade options and what is my responsibility especially for the Paz is quite different as far as size goes. Apologies if my camera is bumping my cat is insistent on being on my lap. Benefits of work from home to G20. I always get bugged. When of course we think about upgrade options here because of course once again, going back to that idea of flexibility with Paz and the fact that you can obviously include, attach and build in whatever you need to make a functional product in that space. Also then says, well, there's a bit of responsibility there for someone in that space but also an opportunity as well. So some of the customers we're talking to who sit in this Paz space are already planning those sort of things. They wanna be in front of where we're at and granted if they are doing it for a smaller package of sites or a single site, go forth. With that in mind, obviously we're keen to talk about challenges that people are running into. So obviously with things like, exactly like what was just sort of mentioned there with migrates and of course a lot of people sort of coming from a feed space, there's a bit of change there as well. So it's up to you but I'm very keen to find out what problems are there, what opportunities are there. I do wanna build out some more of this community space and figure out what people are trying to do and if that benefits broadly more Paz customers or even our SaaS people, then fantastic. Excellent, excellent. Now in the interest of about a minute and a half left, I think almost run out of question time. I'm gonna quickly jump to tech talk. Joseph, this is for you down the business about I guess the status of the distribution for D9. I will give people a quick update. So currently we've got CMS nice and active development. So our goal is trying to get in most of the modules across and provide the information around what needs to be uninstalled and the possible work rounds to the agencies and developers. And we also take it as a good chance to do a code-based spring clean. For example, we are going to replace some of the custom modules from features to Drupal config files. And we are trying to make an upgrade process from GAL-7S8 to D9 as easy and smooth. But we, I mean, like one thing I want to recognize is like we shall also recognize that something best left behind could be best practice. All this module is not well used. Sure, sure, excellent. Okay, I think we've pretty much run out of time. There was another question. I don't know if Ella's still still there. So you may just jump. I don't know if you're gonna have question time but maybe if you guys are available in the meeting hub so people can contact. I guess the main one would be that if anyone has any real questions they can call the GovCMS team or contact GovCMS in general to ask any questions about the upgrade at any time. Definitely, more than happy to be on that. And thanks everyone in chat for correcting me about why it's deprecated first. There's a multitude of reasons but there's some more factual statements there too. But depends on the audience. Thank you. Excellent. Okay, excellent. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you to the GovCMS team here and if you have any questions, contact them. Thanks guys. Thank you again. Thank you. Bye bye.