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?

Twitter accounts to follow are @drupal_org and @drupal_infra . IRC channels: #drupal and #drupal-contribute.

What changes will I experience when the site comes back online?

You can find information about the changes in functionality or UI in the Drupal.org D7 F.A.Q. Most pages on the site won’t change as far as layout or functionality. Our goal for this project was a straight port from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. The only place where you will see significant UI changes is the issue page. This blog post explains what is changing on the issue page and why in detail. In general Drupal 7 gives us more flexibility to implement new features and there will be a boost in performance for some of the pages.

Why aren’t we waiting and upgrading to Drupal 8 once it releases?

The Drupal 7 upgrade began in March 2012. The upgrade took longer than we anticipated due to a variety of reasons that include the scale and complexity of Drupal.org and resource contstraints. We decided to push ahead and complete the Drupal 7 upgrade so Drupal.org can be on the latest release of Drupal, and so we can use the learnings in future upgrades.