Understanding users' upgrade concerns, especially regarding the upgrade expense, Drupal engineers began to look at platforms with layers of code, which allowed newer software versions, like Drupal 9, to have more frequent yet less intensive processes.
How Drupal 9 is Different-and Better for Your Website Upgrade
#Drupal 7 end of life code#
In the first few years after Drupal’s launch in 2001, the key Drupal community members made a fundamental software design decision not to carry legacy code forward into newer versions. In effect, the newest iterations of Drupal would not be backward compatible. This decision made it easier for the developer community to build and maintain the efficiency and flexibility of the platform over time.Ĭonsequently, this strategy made it more difficult for website owners to easily upgrade Drupal to each of the latest versions of the CMS. For example, the path from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 or 9 often requires an almost full rebuild of the code and structure because the codebase of Drupal 7 is fundamentally different than both Drupal 8 and 9, and not compatible by design. These upgrades can be expensive and prohibitive to the many firms that rely on Drupal. To better understand the importance of the Drupal 9 upgrade, it's helpful to be aware of Drupal's history and past versions. The Drupal CMS is a free, powerful, flexible, functional, and secure platform that allows organizations to build a website by selecting and adding modules. While a small team works on Drupal's core code, most of Drupal's evolution can be attributed to the worldwide community of Drupal developers who create and share the tens of thousands of modules currently available for use on the platform. As stated above, as long as you are building on at least Drupal 8, the work required to move to Drupal 9 in the future will be minimal.Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP, a widely used programming language. If you are planning to update, your organisation has strict security/operational requirements specifying the latest technology or this all coincides with a planned rebuild project, you should be building using Drupal 8 or 9. Whilst Drupal 7 is reaching EOL, Drupal has officially said that Drupal 7 will be supported until at least 2025 by the Vendor Extended Support program which will be sufficient for many websites. It will see you through to late 2022 and potentially beyond, as long as you have the support in place.
If you have your website on Drupal 7 you should continue to ensure that it remains patched and maintained. Whilst Drupal 8 and 9 are different versions of the CMS, the transition (or 'upgrade path' to use the jargon) is very smooth, so if you have built, or are building a website using Drupal 8, the steps required to upgrade it to Drupal 9 later on will be minimal. Strangely enough, this isn't a very big decision to make. Which version of Drupal should I move to, 8 or 9? That's because we already have Drupal 9 as well which will continue its new life for some time to come. Yes, there is, although somewhat confusingly it reaches its own EOL a year before Drupal 7 - November 2021. Having said this, migrating your Drupal 7 website to Drupal 8 or 9 (we'll explain shortly) will be a recommended course of action for many organisations where maintaining the latest systems is a core operational requirement. This, in addition to the support you receive from a digital agency (such as us) means that Drupal 7 sites won't stop working after November 2022. Whilst Drupal 7 will no longer receive official updates from the main Drupal community, it is highly likely that a support community will pick up the slack and continue to keep sites secure. Do I need to move away from Drupal 7 at EOL? In short, the system will no longer be proactively supported. This means common regular updates, such as security patches, will no longer officially be delivered. When a version of Drupal reaches the end of its 'life', it means the system will no longer receive direct updates from the core Drupal community. Initially planned for EOL in November 2021, Drupal 7 will now reach EOL a year later, on 28th November 2022. Drupal 7's end-of-life (EOL) has been pushed back by one year in response to the impact on budgets and operations for businesses as a result of COVID-19.
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