I wanted to give a brief update on the status of the Metatag module for Drupal.

With the impending retirement of the Drupal community's proprietary "Drupal CI" test runner as part of the switch to Gitlab, I've been working on getting the module's tests running with Gitlab-CI, Drupal-CI's replacement. Now that this is working, going forward I'm not going to enable Drupal-CI on new branches and will phase out its use on existing branches over time.

Incidentally, in recent trial runs the full battery of v2.0 tests took half the time to finish on Gitlab-CI as they did on Drupal-CI, so this should be a major boon for people trying to see if their proposed changes work as expected. So, a huge thank you to everyone at the Drupal Association and all contributors who worked on getting this working!

Metatag v2 was release in 2023 for both Drupal 7 and 9/10. At the time I said that support for the older v1 branches would continue through the end of 2023. I'm announcing today that active support will end for both Metatag 7.x-1.x and 8.x-1.x at the end of March, 2024, there won't be any active mainteance for these versions and all open issues will be moved to the respective v2 branches. That said, if someone spots a critical bug, or spots an incompatibility with PHP 8.3 that needs to be fixed, or there's a security bug, I'll happily commit the fixes.

The focus going forward is on the Metatag v2 releases and beyond, that is where new changes will be committed and where bugs will be fixed first.

I'm also starting to see a need for Metatag v3 this year, given that PHP annotations are intended to be the default method of implementing APIs for Drupal 11, and we might as well get ahead of the curve. There should not be any changes needed for individual sites, but under the hood there'll be lots of new APIs and old APIs will be deprecated.

BTW, in case you had not heard, Drupal 11 is scheduled to be released in 2024. Yay!

Ecosystem modules

There are a number of support modules for Metatag that cover additional scenarios. Several of these I co-maintain with others and we'll continue maintaining them, but again focusing on the versions compatible with Metatag v2, rather than the older v1.

As Metatag's API continues to change over time I'll do what I can to keep the other modules current, so the upcoming PHP annotations change will be ported to other modules like Schema.org Metatag, etc; don't worry, I don't want anything to break either.

For Schema.org Metatag I strongly recommend moving over to the far more powerful Schema.org Blueprints module. 'Blueprints has a significantly more flexible architecture that allows for building a much more flexible output, without needing to build an extra submodule or plugins for every additional data structure or attribute that needs to be added. Honestly, 'Blueprints is the base that every site should be using for building content architecture, regardless of whether they want schema.org output.

With that caveat, we will continue to support Schema.org Metatag alongside Metatag, but do keep my recommendation in mind.

Thank you

Thank you for reading this, and thank you for using Metatag.