Hello everyone, this is Miguel Yanez from ESI and I would like to welcome everyone to the webinar. It's already over a few minutes past 1 p.m. in central time, 2 p.m. Eastern, and it's a good time to start the webinar. And so I would like to thank everyone for attending this webinar. Today we're going to be talking about on-bill financing and how members only do this in the mid-west can take advantage and make use of on-bill financing. And so before I start the webinar, I would like just to do a couple of housekeeping reminders. And so I will ask everyone to, if you're using your phones, to please mute them. And so it starts 6 if you want to mute your telephones and then later you can unmute them when you want to ask a question. And we will talk about that at the end of the webinar before the questions. And so as I said, my name is Miguel Yanez, I'm with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, which is a nonprofit here based in Washington, D.C. So I'm very happy to be with everyone on this webinar and doing it together with Associated Electric Co-op who have so kindly helped us in promoting this webinar. And I wanted to offer a thank you to them. And so with that I would like to give the word over to Dave Renzi, who is the Manager for Member Energy Services at Associated. So Dave, please take it away. Thank you, Miguel. Well, I just wanted to also welcome everybody to the webinar today. With Miguel and Mark Walters with Renu, Missouri back in April along with Chris Rolffing and we discussed this program. I know it's been around a little while and we have shared that with our member owners in the past. But I think there's some interesting changes possibly to the program that we wanted to hear about and thought this was an opportunity to put the word out there and get our member owners up to speed on it to see it. It was something that they wanted to add to their energy efficiency portfolio. So again, welcome everybody and I'll turn it back over to Miguel. And Lindsay, look forward to hearing what Lindsay has to tell us about the cooperatives of South Carolina. Great. Thank you very much, Dave, for the introduction. He said we started talking about on-bill financing when I was in Missouri back in April and trying to start talking about all the work that ESI, the Environmental Energy Institute is doing in regards to on-bill financing. So let me start with what we do as a non-profit. We're a non-partisan non-profit that mostly works on federal policy, location and clean energy issues. But for the past six years we have been working on a more local level, working with rural electric cars in South Carolina. We're developing an on-bill financing pilot program which will be provided in more detail by the next speaker, Lindsay Smith, who is with the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina. So working with this association and with eight co-ops in South Carolina and with Central Power Electric Co-op, which is the power provider for these co-ops in South Carolina, the same way that Associated is also a GNT or power provider for co-ops across Missouri, North East Oklahoma and Southern Iowa. These co-ops developed about 125 homes and retrofitted them over a 12-month period. So Lindsay Smith will go over these details shortly after my presentation. And so I want to start talking about what is on-bill financing. That's the main topic of this webinar and I just want to lay out the basics of what on-bill is. So in this webinar on-bill financing is mostly alone. It's typically made by utility to one of its customers or members and it's repaid on the monthly bill, the monthly bill of the customer that chooses to do the energy efficiency retrofit. Probably the most common application for on-bill for electric utilities is to finance energy efficiency improvement to their customer home. And so in this webinar, when I refer to on-bill financing, also Lindsay Smith will refer to on-bill financing will be about building efficiency upgrade. But you can also use on-bill financing to finance other things. It could be distributed generation, such as solar, wind and all sorts of other projects. One of the great aspects of on-bill financing is it provides a viable alternative for homeowners that cannot afford the upfront cost of energy efficiency upgrades and therefore cannot use and cannot get all the advantages of the rebates and the tax incentives that are normally used by utilities to get customers to do energy efficiency retrofits. And so as utilities think about developing an on-bill financing program, they can do it in different ways. And so as they design the program, it can be made to be at least bill neutral or even to generate a cash flow positive for the customer. As a bill neutral program, it means that the monthly average energy savings are equal to or greater than the monthly loan payment. And as I said, it can also be designed so that it can provide a positive cash flow for the participants of the program. And so this also allows for alternative loan underwriting methods, such as using good payment bill history of participants to determine eligibility for the program instead of credit checks. So using these alternative underwriting methods can open the door for lower income households that might not have good credit score. And so this goes into the point that on-bill financing really benefits everyone. It benefits customers of all low income and middle class as it opens the door to those that cannot afford upfront payments and to those families that cannot have a good credit check score history. And so it can also benefit renters. And it benefits participants in lowering their energy bills, saving energy, and increasing comfort levels in the house. We have heard of people saying that the house is being retrofitted. They're not just more comfortable, but they feel that their houses are much bigger. That they're feeling because they can be closer to the window than before when it was so cold, it couldn't, or so hot, it couldn't stand close to the window. On-bill, at a larger scale, on-bill financing programs can drive local economic activity and create new contractor and energy auditor jobs. As houses are being retrofitted, it creates a large network of contractors that are certified for developing energy efficiency retrofits, usually BPI or resnet. And so it also benefits the utility as sensually on-bill financing helps customers and members of the co-op and it increases their satisfaction. They're feeling more connected to the co-op and it provides a consumer service program for the utility. And additionally, as on-bill financing reduces energy, it can also curb the need to build new expensive power plants. So on-bill financing is not a new concept. It has been around for decades. Throughout research here at ESI, we have found more than 50 co-ops in 22 states that are either running or have run on-bill financing programs. And they have come in many different shapes and sizes. These programs, especially some of the older ones, are not necessarily designed to achieve energy savings. Some may be simply a heat pump replacement program for an emergency when a customer needs a heat pump at a moment's notice. But other on-bill financing programs have different elements and many of them are about reducing energy for their customers. And so on-bill financing has evolved over time. Some on-bill financing programs date back to the early 80s. A few programs have started in the last few years to tweak the model to offer bigger energy savings to a wider set of their communities, including underserved populations. And so for example, Midwest Energy Co-op in Western Kansas has since 2008 provided more than 1,000 retrofits to their members and has leveraged more than $8 million in energy efficiency investment. Also, five co-ops in Eastern Kentucky are doing a very successful on-bill financing program since 2012. After my speaker time, Lynse Smith will be talking about the South Carolina Cooperative and their Helma House program in which ESI was part of the development. The pilot did include eight co-ops, but right now five co-ops are developing similar Helma House programs all about on-bill financing and they're all about energy efficiency. And so Lynse Smith will go into detail about those programs. And so why on-bill financing and what is the business case for on-bill financing? So on-bill financing at the end of the day is energy efficiency more broadly and it can be a good business case for rural electric co-ops and for public utilities alike. And it's not just about the concept of on-bill financing will sell less power, it's also about member satisfaction. On-bill financing reduces energy so customers feel better in their homes. And so it's a lot of good things that it can do for the customer and for the consumer. And also once the utility is inside of the house of a consumer customer, it can do a lot of other things. It can put a thermostat, it can inform the consumer of all the great elements that the gob can provide and all the services it can offer. And in the long term it provides a lot of good things in reference to the clean power plant and to the local businesses and to the local community. It really keeps all the dollars and the money locally into the community and it helps all around. So we come to the point of talking about on-bill financing and all the great elements that it has. There's a lot more, there's a lot of finer points about design program. But one of the points I want to make is how to finance an on-bill program. That's something that everyone will have on their minds. And so I will go a little bit upon the sources of origination to catalyze an on-bill financing program. And so essentially there's three categories. There's public funds, there's private funds and internal funds. In terms of public funds you can find from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Energy Efficiency Conservation Loan Program, also known as EECLIP, which I will talk about later. And the Rural Economic Development Loan Grant, also known as Red Leg. And so it is the Rural Economic Development Department and the Department of Agriculture that offers these Red Legs at 0%. But they are competitive and they are offered two or three times a year. There's only a two million maximum for application and a 100 million annual cap per year for these loans. UDGDs can also use loans from their cooperative banks such as CFC and Coven. For example, Midwest Energy used $8 million in loans from CFC to catalyze their on-bill financing program and has been able to, as I said, more than 1,000 homes. This is also a viable option for UDGDs. Alternatively, UDGDs may also choose to use their own internal funds to catalyze on-bill financing and this is the most common matter that we have found as we did research on on-bill financing. Coven and UDGDs may choose to create a loan-revolving fund that recycles payments and interest from existing loans that can be used to fund future loans and therefore fund future Red Legs. So, as I said, let me say a few things about ECLIP, about the Energy Efficiency Conservation Loan Program, which is run by the USDA Royal UDGD Service, or IUS. The program went into effect in February of last year and so it is one of the first programs by IUS to systemally offer energy efficiency support for rural UDGDs. Rural UDGDs can use these loans to start up or expand any number of energy efficiency or related activities, if unlike Red Legs as a rolling, not combative application process. And RUS, the Royal UDGD Service, has the capacity and the authority to make ECLIP loans. They have the authority to do up to $6 billion in loans. There's a lot of opportunity for these loans. It is not just for on-bill financing, but on-bill financing programs can use these loans to capitalize them. And so the UDGDs have this great opportunity with ECLIP. The interest rate on ECLIP is the government rate on the day the loan is awarded. So right now it's about 3% and there is a one-eighth that needs to be added to that interest rate. And so who is eligible for the ECLIP loan? Loan recipients for ECLIP can be any electric UDGD. It could be a rural electric cooperative, a public UDGD, or even an investor-owned UDGD, provided that they serve a rural area. And so rural areas is defined as a town or either dedicated, separate place of less than 20,000 people. For UDGDs with service areas that cover both rural areas and larger population centers, the ECLIP loans must be shown to directly benefit the rural portion of the service area. Non-current rural UDGD service buyers would need to be approved or re-approved as RUS buyers in order to be able to apply for ECLIP loans, which could be an involved process. USDA is pretty open to what types of projects these loans can support. So there's a wide range of eligible investments and activities that include energy efficiency projects such as building weatherization, HVAC upgrades, round source heat pumps, efficient lighting, and a lot more. Like insulation, heat pumps, you name it, a lot of them. Other eligible activities include distributed generation for on or off grid renewable energy services, also demand side management investments, and energy audits, as well as consumer education and other soft costs. The loan prohibitions for the ECLIP loans state that these loans are reimbursable and are essentially like a line of credit. So the co-op or rural UDGD that decides to apply for a loan and so what a loan does not actually have to borrow and does not have to pay the interest on all the borrowed money on all the loan. It only pays the interest on the portion of the loan that is withdrawn to be spent on the program. USDA also allows for ECLIP borrowers to use up to 5% of the total loan amount to be received upfront to handle startup costs of the program. And so that is an exception to what I said before. And so because loans can be of any size, there's no maximum to a loan, the larger loan, the more things that can be done with it, provided that they're all detailed in a business plan within the application. And so with the application process, the RUS wants to know what will be included and what will be funded with the loan. So there is no loan maximum, but RUS wants to know what will be done with that amount of money borrowed by the UTD. And so there is two required elements for loan programs, a business plan and a quality assurance plan for the loan funded projects. RUS has given minimal guidance on these plans with the hope that co-ops and other utilities will develop something that works for them and isn't too conformed to a work template. This of course may have led to confusion about what should or should not be included. And so there is in the works a more, let's say, development of a toolkit to provide more specific details on what should go on a business plan and quality assurance plan. But, and so UTD should contact their RUS general field representative to get started on these loans applications. But equally, while it has started about a year ago, it has already provided two loans to two co-ops across the country, totally in $10.5 million. These two co-ops, Roanoke Electric Cooperative in North Carolina and North Arkansas Electric Cooperative are doing on-bill financing programs. They have used these loans to then re-loan it to their customers in order to do energy efficiency programs. Roanoke Electric Cooperative shows to do a more, an on-bill financing program that is tariff based. And so that's one of the possibilities within a design program of an on-bill financing in which it's not alone, it is a debt that the customer has with UTD and that it is put on the meter of the customer. And then that debt, let's say, is repaid over a period of time agreed with the UTD to pay for the cost of the energy efficiency retrofits. And so these repayments are included on the participants' monthly UTD bill. And then so because it's an agreement, it's a debt on the customer, there's no loan, there's no papers. That is a lot easier for the UTD because there's no loan papers. In South Carolina, there was a hybrid and Lindsey Smith will go over that. In North Arkansas Electric Cooperative, it's not a new program. It's a new way to develop their existing on-bill financing program which has been running since the early 80s, is one of the oldest programs run by ACOB. And so they have used Eclipse to get $4.5 million and being able to continue with their successful program, which is mostly for heat pumps and for the station project. And so here is a slide for everyone to look at the USDA resources. And again, we're not trying to promote USDA, we're a non-profit, and we're just trying to tell what are the options for utilities in terms of financing because there are many ways to finance an on-bill program. And as I said before, there's a multitude of them and these ones that I have gone over are one of them. And so finally, I would like to let you know about all the work that ESI has been doing with on-bill financing. ESI has been for the last year being grant funded to do work with utilities as in regards to on-bill financing, assist them to help them think about their design programs and assist them through their capabilities and how to provide capital to their program. And so we are ready to help utilities with financing, including applications to the Eclipse program. And for that, we have a team of experts that are ready to engage with COBS and public entities as well as stakeholders interested in UDD-run efficiency programs. As a non-profit, we are not a turnkey program. But instead, we seek to help utilities set up a program that works for them just as we did when we helped in South Carolina the eight COBS and the on-bill financing pilot. I want to stress that while we function like consultants, our work is grant funded and therefore our assistance is completely free. We don't provide any charts for utilities that won't work with us. Right now, we are working with two municipal data in Michigan and in Iowa to implement on-bill financing. We are also working with one co-op in Michigan to do the same thing and we hope to take this program on a larger scale on these two states. And so let me just turn it over to Lindsey Smith right now who is the vice president of education programs for the Electric Cooperative of South Carolina and he will go over the health house program and how that program developed and what has been done after that by the COBS. So, Lindsey, whenever you want. Miguel, thank you. I appreciate that information and this opportunity to talk to the group about our program in South Carolina Health My House which is an on-bill financing program that we started back in 2011 and continue to work on today. What I will talk about in this presentation is who we are as South Carolina co-ops a little bit of our background, why we got into on-bill financing, how our program works, the results and lessons we've learned and then what we're doing now and what we'll be doing next with this program model. South Carolina Electric Co-ops, there are 20 of them, 20 distribution systems around the state. We serve in all 46 counties across the state and the co-ops come together through their G&T Central Electric Power Cooperative to buy power and also through the statewide which is the organization I work for here. I'll talk a little bit more about the demographics of this group when we get to the next few slides. One thing important to stay here, unlike some co-ops, maybe yours included, we do not own power plants, we buy all of our power, mostly from a state-owned power authority called Santee Cooper, some of it from investor-owned utilities and Southeastern Power Co-op or Power Company. So it's kind of a hodgepodge, but mostly from Santee Cooper. That of course puts us in a fairly unique position as really consumer advocates, which is the role we take most often in most of our stakeholder meetings here. Also important to state for you, we are not state-regulated here in South Carolina. We always talk about we're the most directly regulated group of co-ops or kind of co-ops in that we're regulated by our members. When they get together for annual meetings and vote in and out, trustees of course, that's about as accountable as you get. Here's a little bit more specifically about our members, the demographics. About a quarter of them live in manufactured housing, mobile homes to a lot of folks. That's three times the national average, so that poses a lot of unique housing challenges for us here in the state. Half of them are more likely to live below the national poverty line, so we are poorer as a rule, our members are. In some months, they're spending almost, well, the great majority of their disposable income on their electric bills. That's worth knowing and important and something we've got to work on with them. We write really high and cooling degree days per year. It's a hot place to live and when it's cold, our folks are using primarily electricity to heat their homes, whether it's electric space heaters, resistance heating, or heat pumps, which is most of what they're doing. To address all of those issues, in 2011, the co-ops came together through that G&T I mentioned, Central Electric, and launched a pilot version of on-bill financing called Help My House. You see on the left side of your screen there, the pilot version lasted a couple of years, involved eight co-ops, as Miguel mentioned. They retrofitted in a little less than a year's time, 125 homes. The goal was 100, but they had so many folks interested in participating, they upped the ante a little bit. The main purpose of this pilot or test, it was research. It was the co-ops researching whether energy efficiency could be tapped into instead of asking Santy Cooper and others to keep building more power plants. You all know how that works. When they do that, they pass the cost to you and you pass it to your members and eventually, when you squeeze hard enough, people squirm and people get angry and is there a way to offset some of those expenses and by tapping into energy efficiency, pass along the lower cost to your members and not have to build so many power plants through your power providers. We did this. Central did this with RUS and G&T funding. You heard Miguel mention a moment ago, red leg loans. That's what Central Electric used, and we'll talk some more about that in a minute. Then we'll talk later on in this presentation about the ongoing programs that are currently working at individual co-ops. They have launched individual help from my house. Programs are owned, funding them in different kinds of ways. Five co-ops. The main purpose there is just member service. What are you going to do when those members call you every winter and say, I can't afford this power bill? What can you do for them? That is one thing you can do for them. They've used a mix of co-op and RUS funding dollars to do that. Let's talk about the pilot again. I mentioned Central Electric as the G&T. Their board in 2010 had these efficiency goals. Let's reduce residential energy use in 10 years by 10%. Let's reduce the wholesale residential power purchase costs and let's make sure as we test what we're going to test that we maintain or improve member satisfaction and also, oh, by the way, will consumers buy into this? Will they be interested in this? They partnered with us, the statewide, to design the pilot program. We worked together with folks in Washington at USDA and RUS to actually advance federal legislation that enables more financing of efficiency. Back in that time, red leg would not have been available for energy efficiency loans. We worked with the folks at RUS and USDA and obviously with the folks in Congress as well, and they reworked the rules so that red leg could be used for that. Central was the first co-op group or concern that got one of these newly revamped red leg loans and then kicked off the pilot program using that funding. We structured it in such a way that it is very much like the tariff that is used by those Kentucky co-ops that Miguel mentioned a moment ago. A lot of folks have gone to the tariff model where you're not really making a loan to folks, but instead you're basically putting a surcharge that's transferable to the next person who moves into that home. Well, our loans are set up pretty much the same way. We did ours though through legislation at the state level, a 2010 state law that ties our loans to the meter on the property and also allows us as co-ops or any utility to disconnect the member if they do not pay the loan payment. Again, that loan stays with the home if it's sold, and this helps eliminate the need for a credit check. Why is that important? Because some of the very people who need these retrofits, these improvements to their home, some of the very people who can't afford to pay your electric bills are people who cannot pass a credit check in many cases. So it was important to us to have risk management that got us around to that. More on this, it allows members to finance the energy efficiency loans with our measures with low interest loans, ours are less than or are 4% or less. They're repaid on the monthly utility bills like Miguel described, and of course it gets over a huge barrier, and that is folks who don't have the money in the pocket to go buy a new heat pump. A lot of the rebate programs are terrific. They work great for a subset of your members and consumers, but they have to be folks who can write that check and then get paid back later. A lot of the folks we're talking about here today don't have that money to pay out at the beginning to get a rebate. So more about phase one, this pilot I talked about, eight co-ops, there they are, central electorate, the statewide association, and then key partners. One of them is the host today. Environmental Energy Study Institute could not have done this program without them. They were the folks, they and ECOVA at the bottom of their screen who brought experience to the table with EESIs work funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Here's the structure of the pilot and how we worked. Basically you want to follow central electric as the source of this whole thing as I mentioned.  In order to do a red leg loan, you must have a third party that takes the money from the outfit or the co-op that borrowed it from USDA and then makes the microloans ultimately to, in this case, the co-op and then to the consumer member to pay the contractor. So basically central gives over the money to KW Savings. KW Savings for us is the administrative arm for our help my house program. They own the brand. They work with the co-op. The co-op has an account representative who deals with the consumer member. Come out, take a look at your house, make sure that it pre-qualifies for the program if it does. That representative calls a BPI Building Performance Institute Certified Energy Order who comes out with a blower door, goes to the member's home, conducts the tests, crunches the numbers, projects with computer software. Can we save this person enough money to more than cover that monthly loan payment? If reduced their monthly electric bill by 50 bucks and then their loan payments $40, we just made them more comfortable. We've lowered their overall output for cost of electricity and their loan payment, put a little bit of money in the pocket and everybody's happy so they can make their loan payment and everything. We have a list of certified contractors that we've trained who have a contract with us. They understand our process. The member gets to choose which contractor they want to work with. We give them a list. These are folks who are authorized to be part of our program. These contractors also understand that if this auditor comes in at the end of the job and the work is not done to our standards and satisfaction, the contractor must come back and complete the repairs in the home before he or she gets paid. That's the way it works. Only after that work is done satisfactorily to our standards does the payment of the contractor happen and does the consumer member begin paying on the electric bill. Our available services at KW Savings, you'll see all of them there. We can do it soup to nuts. We can do the whole thing, but Co-op doesn't have the resources and people to do it. Or we can do these different individual items that you see listed here. Everything from energy audits to contractor management, loan review, everything listed there, including work and resolution problem solving after the work is completed. Another important function of KW Savings, that third party I mentioned, we're the brand managers. We're the franchisors. If we're the Chick-fil-A, then everybody else who has a help by house program is a Chick-fil-A store, a franchise. We're making sure that they're all frying the chicken sandwiches the same way. They're all keeping things spotlessly clean. All the employees are nice and doing their jobs well. But importantly, all the quality controls that you see listed here, oversight of loan processing, that has to be something we're plugged into. The data collection is happening as it should. We want to keep up with how the houses are performing after we finish improving them. And then, of course, we have to see the business plan up front. How are you going to operate your help by house program at the local level? Some of the things have to be common from program to program. There is some variability allowed, however. Here, again, is a layout of the process. I kind of went over it when I went through the flow chart earlier, but you see it there. Selection, which is sometimes self-selecting. I have a high power bill. I call my co-op. I need help.  You look at my house. You pre-qualify. Then comes the BPI energy audit. You approve my loan. I get to pick the contractor. Contractor installs on schedule with me. And then that final inspection and approval that I mentioned earlier. When we did the pilot, here's how things broke out. Most everybody got air sealing. That won't surprise many of you who deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis. Duck leakage, something that's most often overlooked by the HVAC, the heat pump installation folks. They just drop the unit and drive off and never take a look at ducks very often. And that's something that needs to be fixed. Attic installation, and then lots of new heat pumps, replacement, and also replacing electric furnaces. Don't know about how things work where you guys live, but here in South Carolina, still, a lot of the mobile homes, single-wide and double-wide mobile homes, are still sold with electric furnaces. Incredibly expensive way to heat a home. And that's some of our double-wide mobile home owners here are paying $500, $600 electric bills in the winter, crazy, but true. Measured results were close to predicted in our pilot. We predicted they'd be about $12,000 KWH a year on average. We came very close to that. That's on the right-hand column. Annual savings also very close. Project costs were dead on. And the simple payback, these red leg loans are 10-year loans. We wanted to come in under that, and we did around six years, six and a half years. Annual savings average per, there you see almost $1,200, average annual savings. Net savings of almost $300 after loan payments are made. So that's significant. Not only making people more comfortable covering their loan payment with the savings they're getting on their electric bill, but also putting money in their pockets. And that was important to us. Demand savings, tracking fairly closely what you saw in energy savings, although we did not install demand control switches in the homes because we wanted to see them perform strictly with the energy efficiency measures. And then we surveyed folks afterwards because we needed to ask them some questions that weren't going to show up on meters and electric bills. Are you satisfied with their co-op? Almost all of them said I am. Even at least as much or higher. Are you more comfortable? Almost 90% somewhat or a lot more comfortable, and that's an important indication for us. We wanted to see that happen. Are you satisfied with your post repair electric bills? Again, 90% said yes, somewhat or vary. Here's an example of some folks who were very satisfied. The Norseworthies who live in Summerton, South Carolina, they're served by Santee Electric Cooperative. You can see they've got kind of a typical size ranch style home about 2,000 square feet. They are both retired, so they're now on fixed incomes, social security and retirement. Any amount they can save on their electric bill is great. We installed the energy efficiency measures. You see they're on your screen to the tune of about $6,500. And this is what they saw on average on their monthly electric bills in terms of savings. Savings approximately $150 to $200 a month. So you can imagine what a huge difference. And that's just one family, one example. There were others that were even higher than that. So what are the lessons and conclusions we learned from the pilot? 34% less electricity on average in each home. And again, almost $300 in savings per year after the payments are made. Coincident peak savings of about a third. Again, tracking about the same as what I showed earlier in electricity use. No load factor, which as I said would have improved with installed control switches. That comfort factor. Very important. And the owner said they got that. And of course they were extremely satisfied. Miguel already showed that slide. So I'm going to skip on and talk to you about this phase two because when this program ended, this research and development program by Central Electric, the G&T, several of the co-ops, some of them involved in the pilot, others not involved in the pilot said, you know, we liked that model. We liked that members liked it, that they were really satisfied with their co-op, that they became more comfortable. And we'd like to explore it as nothing more right now for us than a member service. Something we can finally tell the person who calls us every winter every summer in the heat of summer and says, I can't afford this bill. And so these are the co-ops that have decided to run the program. With ACAN Electric and Santee Electric being two of the first and most active as you can see from their numbers. ACAN Electric, in fact, has applied for and is about to be awarded its third $1 million red leg loan. That's how they're funding their program. Santee Electric just received its first $1 million. Its funding, its lending pool, or it has to this point with its own dollars. And that's true of Black River Electric and the others you see on the grid there as well, with the exception of Lynch's River. The reason you're seeing NA on Little River and Lynch's River, those are brand new programs to the family. Both of them starting their programs, Little River with its own Lynch's River with a million dollar red leg loan that they just received. So approaching 350 homes since the pilot, if you have added the 125 pilot homes, you're getting close to 500 homes program-wide that we've completed with Help My House, which I know relative to some of the programs out there nationally is probably a drop in the bucket. For us, that's significant. And what it does for us is important in that with EPA 111D's final rule coming out, they've said to the states, you guys can get double credit for any energy efficiency you do for low-income residents, for low-income consumers. The fact that we have run a program like this and oh, by the way, partnered with Duke University to sell them some of the carbon offsets that we're gaining by weatherizing these homes, we are having to prove to Duke University and they, in turn, to what we call the carbon offset police, how they're gaining those carbon offsets, how they're getting those improvements. By getting those measures in place and by establishing a way to do that, we're accomplishing something EPA is requiring states to do and that is to be able to prove that you're getting the energy efficiency gains. So we've got a leg up even at this very small scale on something that could go bigger scale depending on what direction the co-ops in the state of South Carolina choose to go. I know we're short on time. I'm going to stop there and hand it back over to Dave, Amory and Miguel and let you guys take it from here. I believe hopefully have a few minutes for questions. Thank you very much, Lindsay. This is Miguel again and thank you very much for your question. Now we will open it up for questions if anyone has any questions or comments about webinar. You can raise your hand. If you want to ask a question, you can raise your hand. If you're using a computer on the upper level of your computer screen, you can also type questions on the chat box and if you want, you can also unmute your phones but please do it in an orderly manner. If you want to ask a question, you can unmute your phone through the pound six. Miguel, this is Dave. One question, I guess I have a Lindsay about defaults. I know that it's tied to the meters but if I pull that meter and nobody else moves in there, I've got an empty house and no repayment of that loan. What was your default rate? Dave, it's less than 1%. We have not had a whole lot of experience with defaults at this stage. What has happened in a couple of cases where folks have just gone bankrupt and moved out, essentially the loan goes dormant during that period so you're not collecting payments, obviously, on the loan at that stage. But when the new homeowner moves in, that state law I spoke of earlier in the presentation has a provision where there's a document in the closing packet for the new owner that says there's this loan on your meter and you will be paying on that loan when you move into the home on your electric bill. So there's disclosure there at closing. The new homeowner knows that's on there. Certainly that new homeowner or the buyer has the option to negotiate that with the bank or whomever selling the home and might negotiate it so that the bank pays it off. But it's there. So the next person coming in pays the loan, begins paying on the loan. The only thing you've lost at that point, of course, is the interest you would have gained otherwise and you're not going to ding the new buyer for that. But you do get the loan paid off also. Thank you. This is Dave. I don't want to dominate the questions, but I guess one of the questions I do have, if nobody else is going to ask something, is on the follow-up on the certification of the energy efficiency savings. Are you requiring a second or follow-up blower door test to guarantee that or are you just a visual inspection? Neither. What we're doing is using billing, history, so usage history for the consumers. We reconnect with the co-op and we pull the usage history for the home since the retrofit was done, which is how that was initially done and studied for the first 12 months after the improvements were completed. In fact, EESI hosted a presentation on Capitol Hill for all the energy legislative liaisons, congressional liaisons to present those findings. That's how we came up with the 34% and so forth. But we're in the process right now of updating that study. So a couple of years since we've checked in on those homes, we want to see how they're doing. As you may be fully aware, some data out there from previous programs that indicate people get less energy efficient once you make their homes more energy efficient, meaning now I'm saving all this money on my electric bill. I like being really cool in this. I'll just turn that thermostat down a little bit lower and they start actually chipping away at some of the savings that you helped them gain. We'll be interested in seeing how that's going to play out and whether or not that's a factor for us in this case. Dave. Thank you. And follow up on that then, Miguel. Is that allowed under the ECLIP program? Or is an audit required on that? It's not required. We did EESI and an evaluation of the program after one year. So we got an external consulting company that looked at all the data from the pilot program after one year and it was weather normalized. And so after looking at all that data, the number at the end of it was 34% energy savings. And so that was really varied because it included single family housing, it included single and double wide manufactured homes. So 50% energy savings, especially double wide and some 25%. So 34 is the average on one year weather normalized data. And it is not required by ECLIP. It was just something that we did after the pilot in 2013 and we have a report for anyone who is interested. And if you want, you can email us. My email address is on the screen. If you want the report and more information, I will be happy to provide to you. Thank you. Well, this is Dave again and I know, Miguel, we talked about the possibility of these slides being available to participants. And are you with that information? Yes, Dave. These slides are available on the site's website and I think we can send an email to everyone that has participated on this webinar and also people who are interested. They can also provide and send email to me. My email address is on the screen and I will be happy to just send them the recording and the website. Alternatively, these slides are on our website, ESI.org. That's where you can find information about this webinar and we will post the slides and the recording on a dedicated website within our website. This is Amri just jumping in. The slides are not quite up yet but they will be very shortly. This is Dave again. It doesn't appear there's any more questions and I do want to thank both Miguel and Lindsay for your presentations and Amri for hosting us today and all the participants for any time out of their schedules to learn more about this on-bill financing opportunity. Yes, I would like to thank everyone for attending this webinar and as I said, if you have any further questions you can email us and as Amri said, the slides will be up soon in our website and you can also send us an email for any questions, comments, or if you want any further information. Thank you very much for everyone and hope to see you soon in another webinar. Thank you very much.


Hey guys, can you pause the movie? I'm gonna go make a drink. Oh yeah, can you make me one? Yeah, sure. Hey John, let's take a funny picture on Derek's photo booth and then make it his background. Oh, you're back. Okay, ready? Yeah. Wait a second, is that...? What is this video? It's a place to go down with Weezy and Nicky, about to go and be a little pretty ricky right on me. Oh my god, that's so embarrassing.  I know. Should we snoop more? Oh, you are wild today. Wait, why was he searching how to create natural looking thick eyebrows? Oh my god, this is too good. Let's pull up his eye photos. Looks like I'm making a monster out of you.  Is that Drake? Yeah, why is he in Derek's shirt? Didn't his grandma knit that? Hey guys, do you know where the lemons are?  Yeah, look in the fridge underneath the celery stalks. Okay. Okay, maybe we should go back to the movie. No way, dude. Derek totally knows Drake. Maybe he can introduce you or something and you can finally get your mixtape heard. Good point. Let's keep snooping. Oh boy. What? It's more Drake. Now Drake is here on the couch. Here he's in Derek's bed. Here he is in the Cal TV office. What's going on? Is he like obsessed with Drake or something? This is getting weird. Go back on his internet. I want to see what the other tabs were. Whoa. He just ordered 300 boxes of Lavendere chamomile bubble bath. Okay, this is getting weird. Is he like trying to be Drake or something? Don't you get it, Andrea? Derek, Drake, Derek, Drake! Drake! He is Drake. He's been Drake the whole time. Drinks are up. Oh hey, Drake, Derek. Or should we say Aubrey? I knew you guys would figure it out. But why, Derek? Why would you lie to us? Nothing was the same. No, come on. I just wanted the best of both worlds. Hang out, take it slow, then you rock out the show. That's fair. Can I trust you two to keep my secret? Well, only if you let us take pictures with you and post them on Facebook. Deal.


One of the major projects that we had was upgrading close to 200 sites for Portland State University from their Drupal 6 system into their Drupal 7 system. And we did that all in one go. It wasn't one day, but it was one go, so to speak. And that's a little bit information about what Imagex Media is doing and some of our clients. So I'm going to stop with the shameless plugging right here. Should you upgrade to Drupal 7? Well, I think the answer is relatively obvious, but for a lot of people that topic is one that causes some nightmares and some headaches. If you were probably the reason why you're sitting in this room today is that you're an administrator, maybe in an organization that has a Drupal 6 installation, a Drupal 6 site. You're maybe the site owner yourself and your current system is in Drupal 6 and you're thinking about like going over to upgrading to Drupal 7. Maybe you're a shop owner or a freelancer and in recent times now the requests have become more and more from clients to, hey, can you upgrade my site from 6 to 7? So we want to talk about a couple of things and make the headaches go away a little bit or make you aware of when the right time is to take a Tylenol, so to speak. So these are a couple of the things that we're going to talk about. Should you upgrade to Drupal 7? And the answer is a resounding yes, but there's a little asterisk beside it because that's a pretty definitive statement. So we're going to briefly touch on some areas also where it might not be the best way to upgrade your site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. If you studied your little program carefully, you saw that there are a lot of sessions this year about actually migrating your site, not going the usual upgrade way, but migrating content. And not only from a different system like WordPress, that also is a valid way of going from a Drupal 6 site to a Drupal 7 site. But in this session we want to concentrate a little bit more of like the traditional way, the upgrading path, the upgrade path that is there. We're going to briefly talk about some of the benefits that you will gain from going to Drupal 7, show you a little bit what the status is regarding core and also contributed modules. We're going to talk about actually how to upgrade what the steps are there regarding core contract, your custom modules, your theme, what is going to happen to your content, CCK fields. We're going to talk a little bit about catastrophes that you might run across or that we experienced. And contrary to every recommendation from the Drupal Association that said don't do live demos, we're going to do a live demo. And Shea is very sure that his script that he has written will work. I'm not so sure about that, so if you're getting bored, tweet to hashtag H-U-7-up, fail or win and bet if we actually managed to get this live demo working at the end of the session or not.  So let's talk a little bit about the new things in Drupal 7 and that is a little bit more from a programmer's perspective. I chose these cars because, let's be honest, the old Mustang, that's a classic, that's still a pretty good car and I feel the same way about Drupal 6. It's still a pretty good system and it's one of the systems that really made Drupal take off more than anything before. But there's just a lot of nice new bling and nice new things in Drupal 7 that makes you considering switching over there. In CoreNow we have the concept of entities, we have an improved form API that has a lot of cool features that programmers can use. We have a new database abstraction layer that makes it much easier to integrate with other databases other than MySQL. And on the contract level we also have a lot of exciting new developments and modules coming out. Some of these have back ports to Drupal 6 or Drupal 6 version but they're not as fully featured as in Drupal 7. Like the media module, display suite or a theming related Omega or Delta. And some of the other benefits and features that came in 7 with new functionality is like now you can cancel accounts. We have a new base theme and admin theme. Accessibility has become better. Usability and I know some of you might grinch when I'm saying these keywords but we have now a dashboard and an overlay in Core. We have contextual links right in there. We have improvements when it comes to security. You need now the hash salt in order to trigger cron runs. We have methods against brute force attacks. And of course mobile, as you heard in Drees's keynote, will be even more integral part in Drupal 8 but Drupal 7 is already on a good way to make it much easier to have mobile-friendly site and mobile applications that you can develop and in order to bring like a really lame Drupal joke and web chicks will dig you if you go with Drupal 7. I'm just going to be very happy if you use that. So these are some of the benefits that you will gain by going to Drupal 7 but now the question is, is Drupal 7 ready for you for the website in your organization or for the client that is coming to you and wants an upgrade and Shay is going to talk a little bit about that. Alright, we'll get back to the point that we had earlier. Is Drupal 7 ready for you?  Yes it is. As far as it goes right now, the core is stable but it's more than stable. If you notice the key point yesterday, the Drupal 7 development lifecycle is now in the mature stage so that means there's not going to be any radical changes, bugs and kind of problems in that. They're out of the way so you shouldn't be running into anything core-related that will prevent you from upgrading from 6 to 7. And from that as well, one of the reasons why we're saying this upgrade a little bit later, core has been stable for about a year and a half now and we haven't said that maybe you shouldn't wait a little bit because a lot of the things that make up Drupal and what it is is the contributed modules and a lot of those weren't ready yet when Drupal 7 came out. So right now there's 3200 contributed modules that are now Drupal 7 versions and that are stable and the majority of these ones are the core ones that you use on your websites in the day to day. Things like context, views, panels and stuff like that. So they're ready and that means that Drupal 7 sites are ready for you as well. As far as Drupal 8 goes, you might be wondering, hey, should I wait? You know, Jesus is telling me like, hey, there's a functionality freeze in December and then there's going to be code freeze in February and then August 8, hey, we're going to have a live video. Why don't I just wait until next year? Again, when I was talking about Drupal 7, it's about a year and a half later now that we're saying, hey, okay, now it's time to upgrade. Although code was stable, a lot of the other contributed modules have to catch up as well and just another point as well. This is the open source community. When these deadlines are set, just be aware that a lot of the times delays happen. You guys part of the software industry, I'm sure that you guys have had pushbacks and things get delayed so I would anticipate that as well. One great notice would be, I've got a tweet here from Angie and this was on February 21st of this year and she marked that this week was the first week that Drupal 7 usage overtook Drupal 6 stats. I just want to show you the trend that's coming up here. This is the weekly project user breakdown on D.org. On March 11, there was 342,000 websites in Drupal 7 and no only 314,000 in Drupal 6. So there's 314,000 sites that work in Drupal 7. There's another reason for you to upgrade as well. As you can see through the time here, Drupal 7's popularity is growing quite quickly so the velocity of the change is huge. To get back to the point through the contributed modules, this is a screenshot of Drupal contrib.org. This was put together by Angie Byron. It's got a listing of the status of the top 60 most popular Drupal modules in Drupal 6, done by usage, and 46 of the top 60 are in a stable state. Some of them are in beta 1, beta 2, like C tools, but they are stable and usable. So I'd check out that site. Along with the ones that you use that are stable and are usable, there are a few problem modules for those of you that have modules like Organic Groups. Right now in Drupal 6 there's 115 different individual modules that add functionality to Organic Groups. There's 21 in Drupal 7. So this is part of the whole thing we're going to try to explain to you today is you got to do a bit of research on whether or not some of the stuff that you use has an upgrade path and is ready in Drupal 7. So some of these ones are the common ones. UberCard. Comma changes a whole bunch in Drupal 7. I actually highly recommend using Drupal 7. If you're going to use anything commerce related, the commerce guys actually just acquired I think about $5 million in funding to progress Drupal 7 e-commerce. So if you guys are into that, I'd definitely be focused on moving up to Drupal 7. If you're using UberCard right now, I know there's a lot of development happening for that, but you might not be ready. Other things to make note is a lot of the SEO tools that are in Drupal 7 aren't as strong as in Drupal 6. Drupal 7 actually itself is a lot more SEO friendly with the adoption of a lot of themes in HTML5, but the tools that you provide your SEO gurus aren't quite there yet. So we have things like NodeWords, which have an upgrade path to a new module called MetaTags, where MetaTags quick. So the tools that you're used to and that you spend all the money and give to your SEO gurus might not be there in Drupal 7. So be aware. You can still do everything in 7, but again, it's just a couple of the modules might not be available there for you. And just a couple of other ones to note, PathRedirect content profile. So on top of this, these are just a couple of handful. Again, you'll have to do a little bit of research when it comes to your own personal site. If you are using the module, go to the page, check it out. There's an issue queue that will usually have an upgrade path status or an issue status so you can kind of see and understand whether or not what I have on my site has a path to 7. So now a little bit less of the why and more of the how, whoever tweeted that out here. How to upgrade core and contrap? Let's say you have done your research, as Shay just mentioned, and your site is a relatively straightforward and standard site regarding Drupal 6. And the modules that you're using on it. Now if you look at these steps and you have already done a little bit of your research, you say like, well, okay, these steps, they seem to be the same steps that are mentioned on Drupal.org documentation. And that's true. This is repetition for emphasis. These steps are really important to follow along. The first step, as stupid as it sounds, is to back up everything. If you don't have your code yet in Git or any version control system, shame on you. It's really important that you have a quick fallback when you're starting to work on the upgrade in case anything goes south or you need to go quickly back to the last point where you started off. The next point that you need to do is you need to upgrade everything to the latest and greatest within Drupal 6. You really have to do that in order to make the transition as quick and as painless as possible. The third step is to disable all non-core modules. Sometimes maybe if you didn't did transitions from five to six, it also worked if you didn't do that. But we found in the projects that we worked with that actually this really helped in order to have a clean transition. Then, if you're using Git, that can be really a simple step is to switching out core and contripped files. If you maybe have a different branch where you already put the new files in, run update PHP, enable all the modules again that you need, run update PHP again, and in a perfect world, you will have a new site. There are tools that can help you to achieve that much quicker and much simpler than doing all of this by hand. Of course that's where Drush comes in and hopefully all of you or most of you are using Drush. The two commands that I want to highlight here is UPC which is short for update code, which if you just use the command like this, is looking at your whole Drupal installation and is looking for the core as well as for any contributed modules that have an update available and then will run that update. You have to follow that up though with a database update. And there's even a Drush command that promises you to do the whole steps one, two, seven for you, which is Drush site upgrade or sub. That works if you have a very straight forward site again. It doesn't work in all cases. So be careful with that, but you definitely can try that out and that can actually help you quite a lot. And some of these steps Shay will later run the demonstration. So just a quick reminder, I think so far we only have fails but that's okay. So what about your custom module? If you have created your custom module, is it looking really bad? If you have a custom module that you want to upgrade and a lot of sites have at least a little helper module in any kind of like minor changes maybe like form tweaks or things like that. One thing you can do, again the documentation on d.org is really good for this. But I want to give you a quick show of a module, the coder module and the coder upgrade module and how these modules can really help you with your site upgrades. So let me quickly go this is a clean Drupal 7 install here and if you want to see again which module it is that I'm talking about it's called coder and in that package is also coder review and coder upgrade. So and I dug out two really old from ancient old Drupal 6 projects two modules to look at it. So one was a custom tie-in to CCK and now in the module page you see a link for code review and when I'm clicking on it the first thing that it does it complains about what crappy code I wrote there and that I didn't indent it in spaces for missing and all of this but that's actually not what I'm interested in. In the review section I can say I want to convert this module from 6 to 7 and also want you to tell me about the coding standards and things like that but just for this demonstration I say just show me the critical things that I really need to do that need to be definitely need to be done in order to get this module from 6 to 7 and now it gives me a number of things already for example hook permissions is the new name of that hook instead of my info file a couple of other functions that don't exist anymore nice thing is it gives me already the replacement functions for it as well as a direct link to the Drupal doc site where I can read more about these changes and what needs to be done there and it also went into the javascript file and told me like the way you have structured that javascript file is not going to work in 6 anymore now there's also the feature here and the upgrade feature has two sections that you can run the first one is that it says like okay I'm going to help you with getting your coding standards in line because that might be all over the place and it makes it easier to migrate a module over and then the second one is actually to apply the core API changes to it and just quickly to show you so here's a module that I really can read that I took spaces out and indenting out and all sorts of things so that was Drupal 6 a helper module now for the coder upgrade it has a directory called coderupgrade old in files directory so this is where you plug in your old module and now I say okay I want you to try to upgrade this module back I want you to look for the coding standards and also the core API changes this one here okay so this has now worked and I can show you the changes that happened now in a new directory called new it placed that module again and what you see is still like the old module and this is the new module so just to show you the changes it actually indented everything it made sure that it all conforms with what we have in Drupal.org but also you might know that a hook block has changed from just one big hook function into multiple so it already did that to me and split that up and it left some to-do messages for me about things that I still need to look at in my module so for example rename the blocks the deltas to something more useful and not just zero or one it also complains about that I didn't have any documentation about what this function is doing and if I'm looking at the install file I'm actually seeing that it tells me well the DB query that syntax has changed so this is the new syntax that I have given you this is your old one just make sure that this statement is still doing what you want to do so a super helpful tool does it work with extremely complex modules that you work with not the coder upgrade right away but definitely the code review will give you a good first start in order to find the different functions that might be deprecated in your module and make it easier for you to upgrade in this regard now that's about the steps on how to use or how to go about core and excuse me about core and your custom modules but then there's also the themes so Shay is going to talk a little bit about how we can what you have to take into consideration regarding your theme I'd like to thank you guys right away for the hashtags I expected both two or three and to answer your questions we got a couple more demos and answers to your questions coming out one of them right here is what about my site's theme unfortunately your site's theme doesn't have a coder module your site theme is most likely custom because you want to reflect your brand so chances are you have something homebrew that reflects your needs as your own regions so we'll talk about that in a sec what's new in Drupal 7 there's new PHP template functions in Drupal 7 so those of you that use preprocess and process functions heavily in your theme this will be a bit of work to migrate those across you're going to need developers is what I'm going to get at when you actually do your site's themes upgrade there's new content variables which is now a block and you can place it around your site's theme and move it around there's new template files there's new HTML and a new region template file they got rid of the box template file so if you happen to use that I don't know who here would or has they got rid of that one so things to be aware of if you had overlaying and kind of wrapped around code in that regard so things to consider is your theme is usually custom there's not too many of you that I'm sure that are here running something like say Minnelli or I don't know Bartek or something well that's for 7 but you're going to have something that you've gone out and you've paid a developer for that brings your brand to life so the upgrade fast for that chances are it doesn't exist you might be lucky I'd go back and take a look and see if there is a Drupal 7 version and whether or not that actually that meets your needs still the demo I'm going to show you later actually has a Minnelli which does actually have an upgrade path which is quite nice within your theme when you're considering about time and cost to upgrade your theme a lot of you I'm sure use views and a lot of you have multiple template files into a couple of themes where I'm digging and finding them all over the sites and custom modules and they have hundreds for every row and field so as you're going through those not only with the module upgrade with your theme upgrade as well so keep that in mind you'll have to make changes to those but when you're upgrading to Drupal 7 consider this a really good opportunity to take a moment to refresh your design to take a look at your look and feel and maybe this is a good chance for you to come up with a new design you might have just actually gone through a whole upgrade to your site look and feel and now you realize oh there's cool stuff in 7 now it's time to go to 7 so you might have to upgrade but this actually would be a really good opportunity to start again to create a new fresh look for your site and with that you can then convert it to HTML5 mobile is a very big thing right now and that's consideration so when you are going to upgrade to 7 there's lots of great tools there's lots of great frameworks those of you who are familiar with the Omega framework I use that and I think it's great but it would be a good chance to switch over to an HTML5 based site and then to get into the mobile market well okay so now we got all my modules all my theme, my core is up to date I got content and I've written a lot of content and I want to keep that content so I do well you have two choices Ben mentioned earlier that there's migration a lot of times if you've developed a new site you might want to just migrate the content over from the D6 into the new clean installation in D7 there's actually I believe a session coming up with Morton after this one it would be a good idea to go check that one out but the upgrade path core should take along take along your content what happens with the site upgrade is if you built your content types with CCK and with core when you run the upgrade that should take all your content along with you all your fields, all your data but it's not 100% there's a few contributed modules out there like say date or even like image for that matter which is now a core which is big they might not come around straight across so what you have to do after you actually upgrade is do a field migration so I got a demo coming up later that will show you again when you do the core upgrade what comes out and what doesn't will you lose anything when you upgrade will you lose your content if you don't back up most likely so I highly again stress the fact is that the upgrade process is a bit of a buggy once with you have a lot of contributed and custom modules so make sure you back up but will you lose anything, no you're not going to lose any of your content it will come forward but something to keep in mind is that if you have custom modules that define content types or custom modules that define fields you will have to upgrade those with the coder first the core upgrade won't do that for you what about my images and other files within my content again if you use in file field that will upgrade through core which is great there's a new module, media it's not new, there's a sixth version there's a seventh version again I highly recommend using that it's compatible with the file field so after you upgrade you should be able to switch what's called the widget type on the field over to the media field and you use the new robust features in the media module and then imce a lot of you probably use imce as your file browser again this would be a good opportunity to move away from that into the media module it will actually allow you to import imce file directly instructor directly into the media module so within the media file browser you can see a structured foldered layout of all your files and preview, it's quite slick actually how to upgrade catastrophes, this is my personal slide for my rant with the demo that I put together I spent I don't know how many hours I'm pulling my hair out, I'm lucky I have more than this good but it has issues and some of the common issues that you might find are something like volume of content we've had a number of sites that have hundreds of thousands of nodes and when you run scripts with hundreds of thousands of nodes things time out, things break and things you know just there are limitations to your hardware so you have to break it up into batches compress them which we say a lot of times when you have such a volume of content is actually the best option might be migrate is to export out pieces of your site and import them in one at a time but while you're doing that upgrades can take a while so while those large batches of content are being upgraded, you're getting new content you have a user contribute site guys are blogging, guys are posting on the forums guys are leaving comments, you don't want to lose any of that so how do you control that well solution, you have a development environment and you have you automate the process as much as you can if you come to a shop or a freelance developer if you happen to write scripts something that they can constantly reuse which again I'll highlight the importance of having a backup and writing scripts because as you do the process is a bit tedious things break, you have to fix something and start all over again so if you're creating a site and it doesn't work it doesn't complete, it's broken you actually have to restore and start again so having and writing scripts is a really important thing in this regard so while your users are making new content and your scripts are running have it so that you can be ready for when your script stops to quickly QA, take a look make sure everything's there do what you have to do, switch over to your site that you upgraded from your live production site and at that point you'll have to migrate in the new content depending how much it is you could do this manually or you could have something like the migrate module node export or some other sort of service to move them across common things that break are file paths how do you track them down when they're in your content link checker and a couple of interns would be really handy and again I really reiterate the process it's a picky and finicky process there are a number of modules that during the process will break will cause issues, will halt the whole thing you got to stop, make the fix adjust the order of operation sometime and restart I'm going to hopefully be able to prove this later so one important thing also especially if you're a company that offers the service of upgrading the site or if you're thinking about it for your organization and want to know what it all will entail is really to be aware and count the cost of what will come ahead of you there might be still a couple of deal breakers out there Shea mentioned the organic groups module there has been a lot of great work done for that also in Drupal 7 but if your Drupal 6 site is using any of the even so exotic modules that have been created for organic groups in 6 you might be out of luck at the moment in Drupal 7 because there have been such major changes to organic groups if you have an extremely hacked core I have my personal opinion about people who had core but you might be a little bit out of luck or there might be actually a lot of work ahead of you in order to make this upgrade working and also if your site is quite outdated you're running still on views one beta or something like that you really should consider just to maybe build it new then to try to run the upgrade path so a number of things to take into consideration that Shea and I already mentioned about and just to recap that you have to take into consideration the number of the contributed modules that you use in your site and what the status is of those modules so you have to do your research there is there an upgrade path if there is if that module doesn't exist in D7 how can I get the how can I keep that functionality what needs to be done there the number of custom modules we showed you what can help you but that was like those were like two relatively simple modules if we're talking about like 10 custom modules with like thousands of lines of code you can kind of imagine how long it will take also then with QA and testing until you have that up and then kind of like the number of themes that you're using on your site and the views TPL hell that it was really easy to get into in Drupal 6 remember these template files need to be adjusted so you have to count them and kind of like think about like okay how many files do I actually need to adjust how many files do I have to work on and also the server and hosting requirements at Drupal 6 was a little bit more lightweight than Drupal 7 so it needs a little bit more power behind it so that's also definitely something that you need to check in order to see if you need to make any changes if you switch over to Drupal 7 environment so to recap is Drupal 7 the way to go yeah it sure is it's on the top of its life cycle it's a great product the features that are in there you want to have them and they're really great it's the best way to move forward especially when it comes also to mobile development is upgrading an easy thing not necessarily but it's not as bad especially if you use the tools that are out there if you for example all your contributed modules there's usually like a ticket in the issue queue that says report and that's a great place to start and looking at like what happened to a number of people that had maybe issues in the past with upgrading their module you have to take your costs into consideration and do a proper site audit of your site in order to really see what you have and how much it will cost you but in the end everything is going to be alright it's not as bad as it looks it really can be done so I saw a couple of wins last time I checked and Shea is going to start the demo and but once he started the demo it's going to take a couple of minutes so you can either then starting already to line up if you have any questions to us or we're going to try to answer some of the questions that came in through the Twitter back channel I was getting a little nervous at first the fail column was quite heavily out front in the start but I think we caught up in the wind near the end and to answer the question yes the slides will be posted there will be a link at the end of this so I'll show you where to get those ooh I'm getting ahead of myself here alright come on over 4 1, 2, 3, 4 ok so what I'm going to do here what I've done I'm going to show you a website what I've done is I've created a Drupal 6 website from a lot of very common very common modules ooh this is big I'm going to make this this small you guys see that? probably ok what I've done is I've created not a simple site but a site here that I'll log out quite quickly enough I've created a site using a lot of very common Drupal contributed modules there's a new system, a calendar system there's a blog, there's forums there's actually an e-commerce store a very simple one that just lists products really that's all it does there's a quick tabs here on the right hand side there's recent news there's a poll there's integration with social media navigation there's quite a bit of things going on in this although small it's only got about 1,500 nodes in it although small it's not simple in the fact that it's a page and an navigation menu there's a few things here what I'm trying to hope to do is go from this site which is actually using a contributed Drupal theme there was an upgrade path there so those are that you were wondering what it would take this one actually had an upgrade path quite nice to get to the new one shrink this which is a nice new shiny theme to have something that looks sort of like this your content comes through, your navigation comes through calendar blog forums so that's what we're going to try to do today and for proof of concept I'm going to show you guys here it is up.hop this is the Drupal 6 site I'm going to run the script and it's going to go through the process that we did today so nothing like code live code to make people run away and while this runs it's going to take anyway when this starts it's going to take about 5 minutes to complete so again we'll get the rest of you guys to please take up to the mic and we'll start answering questions but what this script is doing is it takes, I've upgraded all of the contributed modules to the latest development versions so that already has been prepared but the script will then take all those contributed modules disable them run upgrade on core re-enable the contributed modules with the D7 versions and then run the update on those as well sounds simple, there's probably a couple hundred lines of code in this this is super exciting I know it hasn't done a whole lot yet but it'll start spinning, there we go within this script as well there's a number of DB fixes that I had to do with some contributed modules causing errors in the database so there's a number of little tweaks to get this to work so I'll probably provide this code it's not pretty at the moment I'll have to actually upgrade it and actually leave some comments it's actually re-usable somewhat but what this is doing this is using Drush and a few scripts creating from a D6 version to a D7 version so right now it's actually doing all the contributed module updates I know these are core updates so again, so please take the mic and we'll have some Q&A session here and just to follow up with what Shea has said once he has commented properly the code in this script and it's run through the Coder module for proper syntax we will make that code available to you we're gonna post probably a link on the session page but if you're also interested in it, feel free to shoot Shea or me an email in our presenter site on the Dupalcon and we'll be available for a while after the presentation as well so feel free to come and say it Hi guys, I'm Senpai and just last week there was a new Drush alias committed to Drush 5 that in one step will disable all enabled contrib modules it loops through the site looking for anything that's not core and not theme and disables it in a single command and if you're savvy you can also get that to export to a text file so that you can use the same command in reverse to re-enable everything so you might want to look for that it's kind of cool because Drupal 7 runs the install files of all the modules that are in the site regardless of whether they're disabled or not, how are you guys handling that and do you find that it's still necessary to disable contribs or does it matter from upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7, absolutely, disable your contrib modules prior to operating core what I actually did with this script is because of the way that this works it will actually try to upgrade not only the core, but all the contrib modules at once I have this in a git branch that actually checks out from a D6 branch to a D7 branch without any contrib modules in it so then it runs core very cleanly without any interference from any of the contrib modules completes that and then checks out a new branch which has all the contrib modules in it and then runs the enables and runs all the updates on the D7 versions of those that's kind of how that works though I think it's important to disable them prior to upgrading just a quick question for the drush command which one was that it's actually commented out in one of the RC files I think it's not in core drush but they put it in there as a reference it's called disk-all and you can find the Drupal.org note I think it's 1304400 look it up give or take one or two right great so thank you do you have any experience with upgrading internationalization or the domains models can you talk about that I'm going to be extremely honest with you you know I'm going to be very honest with you the answer would be no for that sorry you mentioned going all the way to dev versions of all your contributed modules rather than a stable release that seems crazy but yeah absolutely the reason why is a lot of the development versions have the bug fixes that were pushed out for the upgrade to Drupal 7 there are quite a few actual Drupal 7 modules that we run development versions of just because things like even like c-tools and views those have the latest bug fixes and those are actually the latest and stablest modules out there so we're doing running the dev versions of things and it is not for every module sometimes it is best that you run the stable version in Drupal 7 but when you're going to upgrade from 6 to 7 majority of the time you want to upgrade to the development version because it has all the latest code and then in the upgrade process or patches that were needed to be applied to that that's for both in 6 and 7 well 6 will definitely development version 7 you can upgrade to stable branches sorry for two questions but the other one is is this a good moment to switch to a different theme or should that sort of be a separate project is this a good moment for that by switch to a different theme do you mean another contributor going from specifically for me Zen to Omega well I have a bit of a bias against Zen so I have to take my two cents on that one I'm sure there will be a few guys arguing with me in this code absolutely I think this is a wonderful time to really take the time to move from your old theme into a new modern responsive layout again like Dries pointed out mobile is very big and is something you should consider so yes this is the time to go so I'm going to pause you for one second here I'm just going to quickly show you this is completed so hopefully we have a new site and I get nervous about this this block administration was assigned to an invalid region that tends to happen so the layout might look a little bit different but when we get back we'll find out come on one two three go that doesn't count as a fail that's a macOS problem okay so this is the moment of truth hopefully we have a final tally on the when I stop counting okay so this is the Drupal 6 site hopefully it looks like something a little bit like the Drupal 7 site when I hit this refresh button so fingers crossed for many people hey it worked so it's there as much as that was done during the live demonstration that took a while and again it took a few minutes to run as well so quick point is we'll get to the questions in a sec not everything does get across 100% with this you'll notice that the blog is missing some images and some social media links those fields a lot of times are contributed fields and actually have to come in and upgrade them using the cckmigrate field upgrade tool that comes out with core while Shay is getting to that tool I'm just going to quickly answer a question that was posted to you on Twitter you said there are two ways upgrade versus fresh install which do you prefer or had to take most of the time you works it really depends on the project that you're working with if the site is relatively straightforward it can save you a lot of time to have all that content moved over and the content types moved over and you don't have to recreate any of this but the moment you get into more complex projects especially if there are new requirements that came in as part of that project that's when it then becomes something where we kind of like say okay you know what this might actually be a good case where it would make more sense to start with a clean slate and just migrate the content over I'm going to quickly go through this page and we'll get to the questions again what this page is it's under the structure and then migrate fields I'm using the admin menu module for those that are wondering what that is this will show you some of the fields that didn't actually make it through during core update and the reason why so we have a date field the 5 star rating field and an image thumbnail field that didn't make it across and also a field listed at the bottom here saying it's missing a reference so this is one of the trouble modules the node reference field there's multiple new entity reference fields that you'll have to either migrate to or provide a transition to the modules we have date a new 5 star and field thumb come in here you check them off on the fields and you run the migrate selected fields button and what this will do is actually migrate your old fields up to the new Drupal 7 entities so that will then allow the site to show the 5 star ratings and the images again I'll show you that in a sec so if we carry on with the questions yes you mentioned sites using Drupal 6 sites using Goober Cart did you elaborate on that I'll be honest I'm not an e-commerce expert we have another individual within our office that takes care of that but as far as e-commerce goes and from what I understand is that Uber Cart hasn't progressed as far as the commerce module and that is the focus in Drupal 7 there's going to be a lot more development happening for the commerce module like I mentioned that the commerce guys acquired a whole bunch of funding without that one so that will most likely be the dominant e-commerce tool for Drupal 7 so that's a consideration you should have what tips or recommendations would you recommend for dealing with a lot of used template files and at what point would you maybe not pursue the upgrade path is there a certain number or complexity there's any magical number a lot of those views template fields too you might just even have a syntax change with the actual wrapper element that can be accomplished a lot of times through things like semantic views and the new view 7 will allow you to pick and choose wrapper and labels that again is a bit of a give and take you'd have to take a look and see what was actually done in those views template files as well which would create even more of a nightmare so it's really hard to say if there's a magic number for that again if there's logic and there is a whole bunch of files and they all have logic definitely something to look into even creating fresh new template files but I can't really give you a magic number on that one I mean in going forward properly you definitely want to look at those template files and just create it in order to make that field be in a span tag instead of like a diff tag or something like that and audit it in this way and try to get rid of these template files that don't have any additional logic in because it has become now in the latest views version in 777 so easy to to do that right through the UI thanks for the demo pretty impressive I think you addressed this question like about five minutes ago while we were waiting but let me maybe you can detail a little bit more you said that in some cases when the site is a bit complicated a bit complex I should say then it's best to try a migrate strategy that integrates and you actually my question was about no reference and you addressed that in the sense that now there is the entities reference module and with multi-values when you have no reference that is multi-values and how you go about that do you run first and upgrade and then you take care of things that those connections that were not properly migrated or how would you go about that in a case like this again Drush can probably be a big friend for you because the thing is you're not losing anything in the database the information and the references are all there so if you have something where really there is where you don't know exactly there is no upgrade path there is nothing documented because it's a very specific case or so through Drush you can run your own PHP scripts with the whole bootstrap so you have everything to you and it's basically just as if you would write your own module so going back to what I mentioned in the beginning the upgrade for Portland State University from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 there were a number of things that we needed to adjust in this way so what we had was about 10 times larger amount of lines of code and scripts that what Shea was using for that demo today in order to upgrade these multi sites and then also run specific upgrades where there was no way to go from what they had in the old system and how it was supposed to work in the new system where you just had to go in and say okay this new module is saving the data information in this way so what I need to do is I get the information from the old tables and I'm plugging them into the new tables and regarding reference I think the jury is a little bit out there because there are two modules that are competing in this realm one is entity reference and the other one is just references I think so that's a little bit it's hard to say which one to go there at the moment yeah there's a third one out there I can't remember what it's called that it does take care of that that gap between six and seven it's kind of a patch module that is out there I can't remember the name but it does for this particular one it allows you to upgrade into it and then from there you might be able to easily use that kind of word fun but may be able to manipulate those references from there to the new entity reference field for example a little easier than it would be directly coming from six hi I have two questions actually the first one is you mentioned about IMCE and media module is there a what's the technical reason for switching to media and Drupal 7 versus just staying with IMCE you can stay with IMCE there's no problem with that at all and actually a lot of guys still use that as far as the new functionality in 7 media module is pretty cool it's really it's easy to manage it allows you to organize folders and create thumbnails and it integrates with WYSIWYG so it really is the the new leader in what's going to go forward in file management so IMCE still works but again you're working on file directory it's a file browser media module has it actually creates file entities and manages them on top of that so there's a lot more power with using the media module and you can import your existing file structures into it so you don't have to it is a preference choice but I quite recommend using it I use it for all the states I build going forward the other question is I'm from a large educational institution and it's interesting to hear that you did Portland State University is there any specific advice you'd give because quite a few people at our university have taken the migrate or rebuild the scratch was there anything being in the university situation that you could think of you would add as good advice well I think in this case why we chose the upgrade was because how they had their content type structured beforehand was really simple, relatively simple they didn't use Drupal 6 to its full potential so the upgrade was just an easier step especially when you were thinking about like 180 like when we started the project it was only 160 site by the time we came to the point where we were saying it was like 180 up to 180, 185 sites so it really again it really depends on do you want to introduce new functionality there is it just about getting it from one platform and the other but it should just do basically the same thing I think this is a you have to look at this on a case by case there is no general rule where you can say this is the if your site falls under these criteria you do upgrade if it goes beyond that you should migrate I think this board is like its large gray zone where you have to really do the content audit and also the site audit about the features and functionality definitely if you want to go a step further if you want to go and say you want to use this opportunity to introduce new features and to introduce a new theme and these kind of things then it's definitely something where migrating it might be actually the better option where the time that you would spend on figuring out how to upgrade it you could use that time against building something new if that somehow makes sense so I have two questions as well the first is how many people did you have on your migration project and how long did it take this is it this is the two of us here I get to steer from the Portland State people there in the back row heights so how long did the the actual technical migration and just not or shake your head the actual part on the code base to run all of these scripts we had them done like in four days a week was that about right and then after that there still was it still was necessary to actually go in and check some of the entered content manually and for that we had we had a couple of more people I don't know how big the team was that we additionally got to go through these three sites and check a couple of manual things regarding tables that for example were in the body field and how they look and these kind of things that are really hard to automate one more question we can do one more question and I think then sorry was that four days to run the scripts or four days to build the scripts oh no building the scripts so long yeah that's how long did that process take because there was a couple of features there that actually changed on us so not only did we write it once where we had to write it a couple of times one example was that media module they changed their underlying methodology of how they're actually going to handle files so we had an upgrade path for that or a migration path for that and then they decided that we're not going to do this anymore and completely changed it so that was a big headache on our side of things to move it over so there was quite a few late nights I'd be hard pressed to put a number on it to be honest but yeah this one here I put in probably 22 hours I think was setting up the sites and getting up configured and working out patches and things like that and that's not including this morning okay thanks everyone and also thanks for all your messages on the back channel there