Tendenci 5.x or earlier clients should upgrade to Tendenci 7+ now.
If you are on Tendenci 5 or earlier, you need to upgrade. For open source self installed users the instructions to upgrade tendenci are on readthedocs. For hosted clients please contact us.
Why? What is driving this notice?
Primarily as a safety precaution even if there are no known issues at this time because Django has declared EOL for Django 1.49 which is behind Tendenci 5. (Note: Tendenci 7 uses Django 1.8+ and is not impacted.)
What happens if we don’t upgrade to a newer version of Tendenci?
First – it’s in your best interest because of changes in search engine technology and user’s browsing behavior. But…
In the short term, probably nothing will happen as there are no known issues that I am aware of as I type this. But if the community is not maintaining Django 1.49 then that means nobody is watching on a daily basis and opens the door to possible security issues being undiscovered.
Is there a cost to upgrade from Tendenci 5 to Tendenci 7? Yes.
Earlier this year google changed it’s ranking system to strongly favor mobile web sites. As a result Tendenci 6 and Tendenci 7 use a significantly different template theming based on Bootstrap 3. In the industry this was referred to as “Google’s Mobilegedon”
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/21/technology/google-mobilegeddon/index.html
Is there a cost to upgrade from Tendenci 6 to 7?
No. There is no cost to upgrade from T6 to T7.
It is redoing the layouts to be mobile responsive that causes the need for human intervention to do the upgrades from T5. And this was driven by google and by you, the user, who now browses the web more on their mobile device than their computer.
We strongly recommend you upgrade with the team at Tendenci or with your own developer. The full upgrade instructions are posted on readthedocs.
The good news is we expect future upgrades to be less painful now that we are bootstrap3+ and mobile compatible. Which is why the T6 to T7 upgrade is free for our hosted clients.
We can’t guarantee that all future upgrades after T7 will be free because you never know what Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Samsung are going to do. But we are doing our best to help you control costs and stay safe on this whole crazy Internet thing.
