For the past few years, the Commons has seen maintenance releases three times monthly. On the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month, plugins and themes were upgraded to their latest versions, except in the case of “major” updates, which were done en masse as part of the release on the 21st. Date-based releases are good for predictability and regularity. But they often result in releases on Fridays or over the weekend, when members of our development and IT teams are not fully available. This has led to the occasional performance issue or period of downtime, when a release caused an unexpected problem, and we were underequipped to handle it.

Beginning in December 2017, we will be moving to a new schedule, in order to mitigate these shortcomings:

• Maintenance releases will take place on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month, at approximately 11am Eastern time.
• Each month’s “major plugin/theme update” release, previously scheduled for the 21st of each month, will now be part of the month’s second release (on the fourth Tuesday). The corresponding blog post will still appear on the 5th of each month.
• When a scheduled release falls on a major holiday (like Christmas 2018), the dev team may decide to push the release to the following business day. This has always been our informal policy, but this post makes it formal 🙂

Maintenance releases have been added to the Commons Calendar of Events. See https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/events/event/commons-maintenance-release/ for an iCal file that will add the releases to your scheduling application.

The guidelines at https://dev.commons.gc.cuny.edu/release-schedule-and-procedures/ have been updated in accordance with the new policy.

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