Why drupal 7

First, the transition from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is not a significant effort in most cases. Drupal 9 is not a reinvention of Drupal, with only two key differences; updated dependencies and deprecating APIs. The Drupal Association illustrates the transition from Drupal 8 to 9 as just a station on the same track versus moving the train to a different track entirely for previous upgrades. For Drupal 7, the original end of life was set for November but due to the impact COVID had on many organizations who are still on Drupal 7, no dependencies on Symfony 3, and the effort needed to upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 requiring a migration and site rebuild , the date was pushed out a year.

Drupal is an Open Source project with a uniquely robust security model :. When Drupal 7 and 8 support ends, there will be no more Drupal core updates to Drupal 7 and 8 - even for critical security issues. The contributed modules that power your site will also no longer be actively tested and reviewed, patches and security evaluation will depend on your internal resources.

A recent study indicates that nearly 12 million websites are currently hacked or infected. Without taking active steps to protect your website, you are going to be vulnerable to a security breach. It is public knowledge that support for it will be ending. Mitigating this risk is much easier with an experienced partner.

We advise our clients to take the following steps:. While Drupal 7 and 8 End of Life might mean more work for you, we view it as an opportunity. The way we consume information on the web has changed drastically since Drupal 7 and 8 launched, and if you are still on these versions and not planning on innovating, you are likely putting yourself at a serious competitive disadvantage.

In the longer term, sticking with Drupal 7 or 8 not only means you will be fighting a constant battle against security vulnerabilities, but also that you will be doing so with a dwindling number of allies.

As time goes on, Drupal 7 and 8 sites will disappear. Fewer agencies will offer any sort of Drupal support for these versions.

The talent pool of developers will dry up - anyone who learns Drupal today will be learning on newer releases. Upgrading from Drupal 7 or 8 to Drupal 9 is the opportunity to revolutionize the way you think about the web as a business tool. If you have a Drupal 7 or 8 site, you have almost certainly had it for at least five years. How many little usability improvements have you considered in that time?

Is your design dated? Now, here comes the question: are you still a part of Drupal 7? If yes, what are your future plans? It is completely up to you to opt for a migration or not but the truth is Drupal 7 is coming close to the end of life EOL. But you should never forget that with change comes new opportunities.

We will talk about the new opportunities that the later versions of Drupal bring in a while but before that Drupal 7 and 8 end of life dates are nearing. On the contrary, Drupal 8 end of life is on November 2nd, and commercial extended security support is not planned for Drupal 8 since Drupal 8 to 9 upgrade is by far the easiest upgrade of the decade when compared to previous major upgrades.

Is Drupal 7 your current CMS? Certainly, it can be since it was the most popular version of Drupal that ever released.

Since its release, there are around , sites who are still using some version of Drupal 7. It also included more than 11, contributed modules, distributions and themes. Well, yes the number is huge. It almost served us for a decade but now it's time for us to upgrade to the later versions of Drupal 7 which comes with a lot of amazing features and benefits. But still you need to know exactly how long will Drupal 7 be supported? And also about Drupal 7 security updates.

Since a huge number of sites are seen using Drupal 7, the community decided to extend the community support until November also keeping under consideration the COVID 19 situation. Therefore, after the release of Drupal 9, Drupal 7 will be supported for around 2. Also, the Drupal Security Team looks forward to following the Security Team processes for Drupal 7 core and contributed projects.

Towards the end of the community support, you will be given the facility of signing up with vendors providing support until Drupal encourages organizations who are interested in delivering commercial Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support to their customers by motivating them to join the program and fill up the application form for the Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support team.

This section will now tell you whether staying on Drupal 7 will be a good decision for your organization or not. But how will you take that decision? Here is a solution. You will need to craft a business case as it will help in estimating the initial and ongoing costs for making the upgrade investment in comparison to the current state of things, also estimating the revenue and settings.

With a business case, you get an opportunity to project the break-even point for your upgrade investment. It is essential to be aware of the risks that might come upon not upgrading from Drupal 7.

Below are the risks that can be a threat to you and your organization. Take a look. Site maintainers will have to spend a lot of time searching for security issues and solving them. In case, if there are a lot of contributed modules in your Drupal configuration, the risks might even get increased. One of the risks that is observed is that while maintaining the status quo, the key integration starts failing. For instance, your Drupal environment might be integrated with any other platform, and a main API on that platform gets deprecated, since the Drupal module which connects to it is no more maintained, you will need to update the module and even write a new custom module in order to keep the integration working.

After the end of life, the Drupal community reduces the amount of activity on Drupal 7 core and modules. So, it will therefore lead you to additional investments. So, have you finally made up your mind to go for an upgrade? I hope you did. Since Drupal 9 got released on June 3rd, , you can directly upgrade from Drupal 7 to 9.

This option can be very convenient as it can assure you that your upgraded site will have maximum expected life. On the other hand, you can first go for an upgrade to Drupal 8, and then finally to Drupal 9. The reasons for upgrading first to Drupal 8 can be of the fact that your site is in need of functionality also provided by modules which are available in Drupal 8 but still not in Drupal 9 release.

So, if you upgrade to Drupal 8 first, it will eventually make the upgrade to Drupal 9 a lot easier. At the time of upgrading a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8 or Drupal 9, there are three vital tools that are being used. Have a look below. Do you have any concerns about upgrading to the Drupal 8 and 9 version? Well there may be things that bother you. So, I will now discuss the exact reasons why the different sites delay in making this move.

One of the major complaints that was made in the early Drupal 8 release cycle about Drupal 8 was that many Drupal 7 contributed modules no longer worked in Drupal 8. It took time for some contributed modules to be updated to Drupal 8. Also many of the Drupal 7 contributed modules were no longer required in Drupal 8, as the functionality they delivered is a part of Drupal 8 core now.

As we've already established that the transition to the latest version of Drupal is actually a necessity, and with the transfer of the planned Drupal 7 support end date, we've gained some additional time, I'll introduce you to this process. I'll try to distinguish two possible paths here: for those less knowledgeable on the subject and for the advanced users who want to learn about our methodology. As already mentioned, the updating process isn't automatic here and requires at least basic technical knowledge and experience in carrying out similar migrations.

If you don't feel up to it, we recommend that you contact the professional Drupal support team for help. Using the services of specialists experienced in this type of migration can significantly shorten the entire process , as well as dispel any doubts related to it.

Now we'll show you, based on our experience, how to handle such a process. First of all, it'll be easier for us to migrate the page to version 8, and after that — to version 9. We should avoid large jumps i. If we manage to migrate the website to Drupal 8, upgrading it to version 9 itself shouldn't cause any major problems.

First of all, we need to replace the obsolete methods in our code with new code or just get rid of them. Drupal-check is one of the tools that can help us find such a code. General information Released on 5 January , Drupal 7 was the successor to Drupal 6, obviously, and brought many awaited and — above all — necessary changes.

The concept of entity was introduced , known from many other solutions. Hereafter, entities can be anything — from a user profile and a node, to things like a comment or a taxonomy term. Support for multisite appeared. Drupal 7 end of life - change of date Originally, Drupal 7 end of support was planned for November End of support for Drupal 7 From the end of November , no further official patches will be published.

Drupal 7 vs Drupal 8 The introduction of Drupal 8 meant a very big and significant change towards the development of the system. Drupal has been rewritten using the Symfony framework.

For those unfamiliar with the topic, Symfony is one of the most popular PHP frameworks. Therefore, from the very beginning Drupal could boast that it gets a lot of support from the community and creators associated with Symfony. A new engine for creating templates has been introduced - the well-known and popular Twig this is the result of switching to Symfony, where this engine is also used. This streamlines the work when creating templates, and brings the way of implementing them closer to modern standards, abandoning the previous themes and PHP templates.

The lack of a sensible text editor in Drupal 7 has been solved in version 8 with CKEditor - an extremely powerful and multifunctional tool for working with content. The Views module has become a part of the system's core.

Drupal 8 brought almost changes and patches that you can read about on Drupal. You may also be interested in: 10 tricks to work efficiently with the Composer in Drupal 8 Then is the change from version 7 to version 8 or even version 9 which you'll read about further down a good idea? Drupal 7 EOL - professional help As we've already established that the transition to the latest version of Drupal is actually a necessity, and with the transfer of the planned Drupal 7 support end date, we've gained some additional time, I'll introduce you to this process.