As you probably know, Drupal 6 reached its End-of-Life (EOL) on February 24th, 2016. However, the mantle of supporting Drupal 6 was taken up by the Drupal 6 Long-Term Support vendors - including the team here at myDropWizard!

Long-Term Support isn't glamorous or exciting.

It's making security releases. It's minor bug fixes. Sometimes it's updating a contrib module that hasn't had an official release since 2009 to work with PHP 7. :-)

In fact, a big part of Drupal 6 Long-Term Support (D6LTS) is updating Drupal 6 core and contrib to work with new technologies, especially as the older versions that it was originally designed to work with become deprecated or reach their own EOL, like when PHP 5 reached its EOL at the end of last year. (Did you know that Drupal 6 now works with PHP 7?)

Today, I'd like to announce that Drupal 6 supports MySQL 8, starting with Drupal 6.51!

This was implemented in collaboration with the community, largely the contributions of f1mishutka, but also a number of others who contributed testing and bug reports.

I know there's a lot of anxiety over how Drupal 7 Extended Support (D7ES) is going to work, however, I think that this is more evidence that the vendor-supported model used by D6LTS (and soon, D7ES) is working.

You can download the latest Drupal 6 LTS core release from GitHub.