There are many things for you to consider as the Drupal 7 end of life approaches. If your company is still using Drupal 7, you should seriously consider upgrading to Drupal 9 or Drupal 10.
Is it time to establish a plan? Definitely. Firstly, look into available choices and get proper drupal consulting. But what other options are available?
To assist you decide what to do next, we've gathered some frequently asked questions.
Once Drupal 10 was released in December, you may ask yourself “When is Drupal 7 end of life?” which is a timely question.
The Drupal community will formally end supporting Drupal 7 on November 1, 2023. Thus, community-based updates for bug fixes, brand-new features, or security updates are no longer available.
Drupal end-of-life is a word phrase used to describe when a piece of software will no longer get drupal support and maintenance. As Drupal 7 end of life date will be reached on November 1, Drupal's community and security team will no longer be issuing any security patches or functional upgrades.
For the time being, businesses may continue utilizing their Drupal 7 website. Even still, technical concerns such as deprecated modules will persist after D7's EOL date. By November 2022, only a select group of suppliers, including Drupfan, will offer Drupal 7 end of life extended support on a paid basis. Take a chance to hire drupal developers to deal with this for you!
As a result, Drupal.org is announcing that the planned Drupal 7 support End-of-Life date will henceforth be reassessed every year. As of right now, the end-of-life has been postponed until November 1, 2023.
Since the previous Drupal 7 end-of-life support extension, Dries Buytaert, the project lead for Drupal, the Drupal Association, and the Drupal Security Working Group have been keeping an eye on the Drupal 7 ecosystem.
According to the Drupal.org team, there is an obvious need to offer further assistance to the members of our community who are still using Drupal 7. They have a moral obligation to maintain as many of those websites secure as they can even after reaching Drupal 7 end of support date.
By July 2023, they will let the Drupal community know if they are going to add another year of community support for Drupal 7. They will take into account community support, Drupal 7 adoption, and active Drupal 7 maintainers. The numerous Drupal 7 businesses who pay for Drupal 7 maintenance make current support feasible.
Several alternatives are available if your website was created with Drupal 7:
1. Migrate to Drupal 8 or 9
You have the option of upgrading your current Drupal setup to Drupal 8 or 9. The wide range of compatibility between D8 and D9 guarantees a seamless upgrading in the future. Despite this, switching to D8 before D9 is not required.
2. Postpone your upgrade:
One of the only partners offering Drupal development service to support Drupal sites beyond Drupal 7 end-of-life is Drupfan. The official long-term extended support program is made for businesses who have to put off an update for the reasons listed below:
1. The strategic roadmap for digital transformation needs to be adjusted or is not yet ready.
After the end-of-life for Drupal 7, some firms have entirely revised their business models and will be looking to change or extend their digital strategies. That is perfectly OK.
2. The business strategy won't alter in the upcoming months, but your company needs funding.
It would be wiser to delay this important project if the digital investment you had planned is in jeopardy. That is a fantastic alternative as well.
Evidently, upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 is a major undertaking. What happens, though, if you don't?
First, you may relax knowing that your website will keep working. However, there won't be any further module or Drupal core releases or bug patches after reaching Drupal 7 end of life 2023. Through the Drupal 7 Extended Vendor Support program, a few restricted security patches will be available through November 2025.
However, as time goes on, you will lag behind new developments and find it harder to satisfy the expectations of your consumers.
Secondly, as the community-based Drupal Security Team ceases keeping an eye on Drupal version 7 end of life, security will become more of a problem.
Finally, any plugins or other integrations from third parties may stop working when their developers switch to technologies that are incompatible with Drupal 7.
Maintaining Drupal 7 may seem the simplest option, but it will use up more resources and jeopardize the goals of your company.
