Drupal 7 websites get another end-of-life breather ... till 2025!
Websites running on Drupal 7 have been thrown one final lifebuoy with the announcement that its end-of-life has been pushed back one last time – to 5 January 2025.
Drupal 7 has staying power. Its end-of-life has been extended so many times, it’s hard to believe it was initially released on 5 January 2011.
But this, its last extension, will make it 14 years old by the time it is officially retired – not bad going for a platform that has seen three newer versions released after it.
In February, Drupal 7's end-of-life was extended to 1 November 2023, and this last, much-anticipated extension was officially announced at DrupalCon Pittsburgh today, with the stark warning: If you are still maintaining a Drupal 7 site, we recommend migrating to Drupal 10 before the end-of-life date.”
And those bobbing about on the Drupal 7 lifebuoy know that the time to upgrade is now. After all, Drupal 7 is older than many other platforms out there – Drupal 8 reached end-of-life in 2021 and Drupal 9’s is November this year.
If you are still maintaining a Drupal 7 site, we recommend migrating to Drupal 10 before the end-of-life date.
– Drupal's Security Team
These are the key points of today’s announcement:
- Drupal 7 supports old legacy versions of PHP. But from 1 August 2023 everything below PHP5.6 will be unsupported. Because PHP 5.6 itself is unsupported by the PHP community, support for that may be dropped at any point with one month's notice.
- From 1 August 2023, there will be reduced support for moderately critical and lower severity security issues. Only the most critical ones (critical and highly critical) will get security releases. Lower severity ones may just be published openly with no security release, as long as they are not mass-exploitable.
- If you host your Drupal 7 website on Windows, then you are unsupported from 1 August 2023.
- When a contributed module (aka extension) gets marked unsupported after 1 August 2023 it will not be eligible for new maintainership and will not be marked supported again.
- From 1 August 2023, Drupal.org will no longer create Drupal 7 distribution packages with Drush "make" files. This means you will need to use "drush make" locally.
More than a decade after its first release, Drupal 7 is still widely used – by 51% of all the websites that use Drupal.
Government websites, educational institutions, businesses and non-profit organisations – many of which offer important services to their users – are among those who are still using it.
“The fact is that many websites are still reliant on Drupal 7,” said Stella Power, Annertech’s managing Director and a member of the Drupal Security Team.
“Upgrading to a newer version of Drupal is important in terms of keeping a website running efficiently and keeping it safe. We understand that this is an arduous task that takes time and money, but it’s an investment worth taking – especially because once you’ve upgraded from Drupal 7 and its legacy infrastructure, any subsequent upgrades are much easier to undertake,” said Stella.
We understand that upgrading a website is an arduous task that takes time and money, but it’s an investment worth taking.
– Stella Power
It takes time to migrate properly, and Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 upgrades or site rebuilds can take anywhere from 16 to 30 weeks, maybe even longer depending on the complexity of the website.
If you miss the end-of-life deadline, your site will still be available online. 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.
Our Director of Managed Services Anthony Lindsay wrote about the risks of staying on a version of Drupal that has reached end of life. He also sets out the various options available to those who are running websites on Drupal 7.
If you still have questions after that, this blog answers all those we are frequently asked.
The Drupal Association has created a landing page with resources to help those who need to upgrade their website.
Annertech has been supporting those wishing to move on from Drupal 7 to newer versions of Drupal for more than seven years.
“We get that it’s a daunting task to upgrade a website, but it’s one that’s better started sooner rather than too late,” said Stella.
