All your Drupal 7 FAQ answered
The “7” version of the Drupal CMS is reaching its end-of-life in 2025. But what does that mean if you’re still using it for your website?
These are the questions that we are asked frequently:
How long will Drupal 7 be supported?
Drupal 7 has been nearing end-of-life for a while now, but it was recently announced that 5 January 2025 will be it for this version of Drupal.
What is the latest Drupal version?
Drupal 10 was released in December 2022. The good news is that upgrading has become quite smooth since Drupal 8 thanks to inbuilt backward compatibility and updated underlying libraries.
What are key migration differences for Drupal 9 vs Drupal 10?
There are two key differences between Drupal 9 and Drupal 10:
Unlike previous new major versions, Drupal 10 is not a reinvention. It was largely built in Drupal 9 through deprecating APIs and updated dependencies.?
The Drupal 8/Drupal 9/Drupal 10 upgrade process is much easier than previous major-version upgrades and there are many automated tools available to assist with the upgrade.
Latest extension: This is what you need to know
What if I stay on Drupal 7?
One of the reasons behind the end of life extension for Drupal 7 is that it is currently used by 50% of all the websites who use Drupal! That’s a large number of websites to just cut support from, but it has to happen at some point.
The bottom line is that if you fail to upgrade before the 5 January 2025 end-of-life date, your site will still function. But as technology keeps evolving, Drupal 7 will keep falling further behind. And without active community support, there will be no more bug fixes or feature updates to modules and Drupal core.
Not only will your site fall behind as new innovations are introduced, but security will eventually become an issue, and your site’s functionality may be affected. It also may not work adequately with other plugins, as they advance or are decommissioned in favour of other tech or newer versions.
Is it better to upgrade from Drupal 7 to 8 (and then to 10) or directly to 10?
There is no upgrade path for Drupal 7, and it does require a bit of work to update and migrate to the next latest version.
But it is worth it, especially when it comes to the new features and functionality that are released every six months.
Do you have to migrate to Drupal 8 and then Drupal 10? No. Drupal 8 is already end-of-life, so all upgrades (or rather migrations) should go straight to Drupal 10. Migrations from Drupal 7 to later versions of Drupal were anticipated and planned for.
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Is Drupal still good?
This much-loved open-source CMS has been around for 23 years! It has become known for being secure, reliable and flexible, and it is quite popular – it’s the third most popular CMS by market share, with about 1.7 million websites built using Drupal.
Drupal is fast, simple to update, clutter-free, and up-to-date. It is one of the top performing content management systems and thus it is well-suited to websites with large volumes of traffic and complex sites, and is especially popular with government organisations.
It is flexible and it is easy to integrate third-party tools such as customer relationship management software or inbound marketing platforms.
What is the difference between Drupal 7 and Drupal 10?
The biggest difference is that Drupal 10 has “backward compatibility”. Drupal 7 does not have this. In other words, Drupal 10 is able to use modules, customisations and data originally created for Drupal 8, with some minor alterations.
Because deprecated code needs to be deleted, Drupal 10’s code is clean, the platform itself is nimble and this results in excellent website performance.
Drupal 10 is user friendly, easy-to-use, versatile and scalable. Some more technical differences include a new theme engine called Twig (introduced in Drupal 8), which replaces PHPTemplate in Drupal 7.
Because Drupal 10 requires an up-to-date hosting environment with the most recent PHP database engine or key-value store, it is faster than Drupal 7.
Content modelling has been simplified, so Drupal 10 is great for content-heavy web applications. CKEditor, a new text editor, provides users with many WYSIWYG editing features that were previously only available through extensions.
CKEditor 5 is available in Drupal 10, and looks amazing! Other features are responsive images, improved multilingual capabilities, JSON:API and more modules out-of-the-box.
How long does it take to upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10?
Unlike moving between Drupal 8, 9 & 10, with their new semantic versioning of releases and straightforward upgrade path, the move from Drupal 7 can be a significant amount of work.
It can take a few weeks to migrate a website without any customised modules and just a few content types. But complex websites, or projects where restructuring is included, will take longer to migrate to Drupal 10. This is largely dependent on the size of the website and the amount of content and features to be migrated.
If rebuilding your site, this is the perfect time to reassess its suitability for your needs, but it does increase the duration of the project, with some projects taking months to complete.
The bottom line is:
Websites on Drupal 7 are running out of time to migrate – and it takes longer than you think.
It may be a cost outlay that you didn’t want (or expect), and it may take time and resources that you would prefer to allocate elsewhere but it will be worth it in the long run.
It's now time to start planning, if you haven't done so already.