End of The Road for Orbit CMS

We wanted to provide our clients that are still on the Orbit Content Management System some advance notice that this CMS is now end of life (EOL). Back in June 2015, Orbit CMS development was discontinued, and the product went into its sunset phase. No new websites have been built on Orbit since that date.

We have continued to develop Orbit through the five-year sunset phase, but that phase ends in June 2020. Following that date, Orbit will continue to function as normal and we will continue to offer operational support, but no further development will be undertaken for the platform. The software will no longer be updated to meet emerging technologies.

Orbit is written in PHP v5.4 which is part of the Core of Centos 7 (the operating system that we run on our servers). Centos will continue to release full updates for version 7 until the fourth quarter of 2020, and then security releases only until June 2024. When this happens, PHP v5.4 will officially be listed as vulnerable and we will need to disable that version of PHP on our servers, meaning that Orbit will no longer run. Obviously, that is a situation we are keen to avoid, so we would like to invite all remaining Orbit clients to consider a move to a new Content Management System.

Essentially, there is a short window through which we will continue development of Orbit for bespoke needs (closing June 2020), after which operational support only will be provided until June 2024, by which time all websites must be moved off Orbit. We are platform agnostic and will recommend an alternative platform that is the best fit for your specific needs. That might be WordPress for the majority of our clients, or Magento or Drupal for Corporate clients or high-volume Ecommerce sites.

There is no urgent action required, however now might be a good time to start considering a website upgrade in any future marketing or budgeting decisions. 

We will be in touch to speak with all clients over the coming six months or so, however please get in touch if you have any questions or are ready to consider a site upgrade sooner rather than later.