Drupal 7 Transition Planning

The Drupal 7 content management system (CMS), which was originally scheduled to reach the end of life in November 2021, has had its support extended even further.

In June 2023, Acquia announced it would continue to fund maintenance and security updates for Drupal 7 through January 2025. This additional two years of support provides substantial breathing room for organizations using Drupal 7 to plan their transition to Drupal 9.

Pushing Drupal 7’s end-of-life out to 2025 gives many users much-welcomed extra time. Migrating a large, complex Drupal site to a new version is resource intensive. Maintaining Drupal 7 through January 2025 allows ample time for careful planning and execution of a transition strategy.

However, all Drupal 7 sites will still eventually need to upgrade to Drupal 10 which provides significant improvements over version 7 in security, features, and performance. Organizations wanting to leverage Drupal's latest capabilities should keep working towards an upgrade, just on a more relaxed timeline.

The Drupal community continues demonstrating dedication to users by extending support for legacy versions like Drupal 7. Even when Drupal 7 reaches its official end of life in 2025, its enduring popularity and capabilities will carry forward into new Drupal releases like Drupal 10.

Once Drupal 7 reaches End of Life, this means:

1. The Drupal Security Team will no longer provide support or Security Advisories for Drupal 7 core, contributed modules and themes.
2. Security issues for Drupal 7 may be disclosed in public, and zero-days (i.e, security vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild without advance warning) may occur.
3. Drupal.org will no longer support tasks related to Drupal 7 including documentation navigation, automated testing, packaging, etc.
4. All Drupal 7-compatible releases on project pages will be flagged as not supported.
5. Some Drush functionality for Drupal 7 will stop working as the underlying Drupal.org infrastructure will be removed.
6. Drupal.org file archive packaging (tar and zip files) for Drupal 7 will be shut off.
7. The archives may be removed.
8. There will be no more core commits on Drupal core 7.x.
9. Package tarballs may no longer be downloadable.
10. External vulnerability scans will flag Drupal 7 as insecure.

If you're yet to start planning your move off the Drupal 7 CMS - get in touch and Ixis or CTI Digital can assist in the transition process planning and building of your new website.