Thunder

A distribution for professional publishing

by Hubert Burda Media

Thunder is a Drupal distribution for professional publishing. It consists of the current Drupal functionality, lots of handpicked publisher-centric modules with custom enhancements, and an environment that makes it easy to install, deploy and add new functionality.

As members of the Thunder Coalition, publishers, industry partners, and developers build custom extensions and share them with the Coalition to further enhance Thunder.

Using Thunder? Tell us about it!

Installation

Instructions on how to install Thunder can be found at the installation guide and in the Drupal documentation.

About Thunder 3

One of Thunder’s main distinctive features is media handling. In version 2, this relied on the contrib module Media Entity. This module isn't supported by Drupal 9 anymore. But don't worry: Drupal integrated the media handling in the core features some versions ago. So, Thunder 3 incorporates the media handling from Drupal core and removed the contrib module. As the update requires a manual migration and it, therefore, comes with breaking changes, we introduced a new major version of Thunder.

If you want to switch from Thunder 2 to Thunder 3

We have good news to anybody who wants to switch from Thunder 2 to Thunder 3:

• The migration process is well documented: https://thunder.github.io/developer-guide/migration/migrate-2-3.html
• No data migration is needed, it´s code only

About Thunder 6

Compared to the previous version Thunder 3, relatively few changes have been made in order to make updating as easy as possible. Since December 2019 the Thunder Core Team has been busy checking all modules used in Thunder for deprecations, solved them, and thus prepared all modules for Drupal 9.

Unfortunately, this did not succeed with two modules. So, this is actually the biggest change Thunder 6 brings you: We had to remove the modules Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Facebook Instant Articles from the distribution (at least for now). If these modules are in use on your site, we recommend that you do not install Thunder 6 and stay on Thunder 3 for the time being.

If you want to switch from Thunder 3 to Thunder 6

Detailed instructions on how to update your site from Thunder 3 to Thunder 6 can be found in our documentation at https://thunder.github.io/developer-guide/migration/migrate-3-6.html

Multiple Thunder versions mean various levels of support

Since 2019, several Thunder versions exist side by side and are maintained by us. Here's an overview of the versions and releases:

Thunder 2

Thunder 2 is based on Drupal 8.7. Our support for Thunder 2 ended in June 2020. This means, we will release neither security patches nor critical bug fixes. There will be no new features for Thunder 2.

Thunder 3

Thunder 3.5.x (8.x-5.x) is based on Drupal 8.9. There will be new features released in this version, and the Thunder team will take care of security patches and critical bug fixes. The Thunder team will support this version until Drupal 8.9 will be discontinued in November 2021.

Thunder 6

Thunder 6.x is based on Drupal 9. There will be new features released in this version, and the Thunder team will take care of security patches and critical bug fixes. The Thunder team will likely support this version until November 2023 when Drupal 9 will probably be discontinued.

We will always support the two latest versions: With every new Drupal minor version, we will also release a new Thunder version that will be fully supported. The older minor version will stay at security and bugfix support. Versions older than this won’t be supported anymore.

Further Links

• thunder.org
• Composer template for Thunder projects
• Thunder on Github