Drupal have announced some very good news this week for Drupal 7 website owners. The End of Life date for the Drupal 7 version of the platform has been extended by a minimum of a further year to November 2023.
Originally set for November this year, the extension now gives more time to businesses and organisations still with websites on Drupal 7 to look at upgrading their websites before they go out of official support once the End of Life date is reached.
End of Life for Drupal 7 was originally announced as November 2021 but was later extended by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This latest announcement now gives peace of mind that Drupal 7 sites will continue to be supported and secured until at least November 2023, with the possibility of the support also being extended further still.
The announcement, made on the Drupal.org website, recognised that "a majority of all sites in the Drupal project are still on Drupal 7" and that the steering group on Drupal have decided that "there is a clear need to provide additional support to the members of our community still using this version."
The announcement continued: "At the end of the day, we have a moral imperative to keep as many of those sites secure as we can."
While the new End of Life date has so far been set for November 2023, plans have also been outlined to potentially extend support for the older platform even further beyond that date. The announcement said that "moving forward, the scheduled Drupal 7 End-of-Life date will be re-evaluated annually".
Any news on whether or not support for the platform will continue beyond November 2023 will be announced by July next year. The decision will be based on a number of factors including the number of sites still remaining on Drupal 7 at that point and the level of community support and active Drupal 7 maintainers still willing to participate in supporting that version.
Despite the extension to Drupal 7 End of Life, the advice from both us here at Adaptive and the wider Drupal community is still to look at upgrading your Drupal 7 website to the latest version of Drupal when time and budget allows. Drupal 10 not only offers a range of enhanced features over its predecessor but also puts your website onto a platform that can be fully upgraded to future versions of Drupal with much greater ease. This therefore secures the long-term future of your website once it is on the newer platform version.
You can read more about what End of Life means for your website in our Drupal 7 End-of-Life FAQs guide. We also outline what's involved in moving your website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 in this post.
For more advice on what to do with your Drupal 7 website going forward, please contact us and we'll be happy to provide further guidance.
(This article was updated in December 2022 to reflect the release of Drupal 10)