I've been a happy Drupal user for two decades now and I continue to love it, but the time to let go is approaching.

Drupal 7 will finally reach its much-deferred End Of Life on 5 January 2025 (day three of the SCG Test against India, although that fact is totally irrelevant) and I have decided that I have no professional need to make the upgrade to Drupal 10 or even to learn about it. Thus, the time to close my Drupal site will come over the next six months.

This does not mean my blog is disappearing from the web. The archives will appear in another format - possibly back to Wordpress, although I am open to other more Federated suggestions. December 2024 marks the thirtieth anniversary of my first website on Ozemail, although I don't recall the exact date, and even though with so many other cloud solutions I don't hugely need a hosting service for my own website any more, I will continue the tradition in some form or other as long as I can.

More news on these developments as they come to the proverbial hand.

I will remain a member of the Drupal Association for the indefinite future - they are calling individual members "Ripple Makers" these days - and for what it is worth I retain an account on the near-deserted Drupal Community Mastodon instance @rickeyre@drupal.community. Better Mastodon contacts for me, of course, are @rickeyre@mastodon.social, @rickeyrecricket@mastodon.au or the currently in beta Mastodon-Threads hookup at @rickeyre@threads.net and @rickeyrecricket@threads.net.

I am also on the official Drupal Slack (name what else but rickeyre). It will be hard saying goodbye but I no longer have the hunger or interest in coding and configuring.