Support for Drupal 7 was first extended due to COVID and the economic situation... This time it's final: minimum support for Drupal 7 is officially extended until January 5, 2025. And this will be the last time.
An announcement everyone was waiting for...
The announcement, published on June 7, 2023, at the DrupalCon in Pittsburgh, has definitively sealed the fate of Drupal 7. We had been expecting it ever since the compliance update of Drupal 7 with PHP 8 a few months earlier :) It’s now official, and this will be the last extension.
This decision is explained by the number of Drupal 7 sites still in production on one hand, and by the effort required to upgrade on the other. But it does not exempt Drupal 7 site administrators from planning their upgrade...
From August 1, 2023, support levels will be reduced
The support provided will be more like a traditional LTS. The drupal.org security team has indeed announced a reduction in support for moderately critical issues encountered with Drupal 7. The community also announces:
- The availability of security patches by the drupal.org security team will be discretionary. In other words, they will choose whether or not to release minor or moderately critical fixes depending on the risk of mass exploitation.
- Unsupported modules will no longer be eligible for security coverage.
- PHP versions lower than PHP 5.6 will no longer be supported on Drupal 7.
- Security patches for Drupal 7 sites running on Windows will no longer be provided.
- Drupal.org will no longer maintain Drupal 7 distribution packages.
If you still have a Drupal 7 site as of January 5, 2025
- The Drupal security team will no longer provide support or security advisories for Drupal 7 core, contributed modules, and themes.
- Drupal 7 security vulnerabilities may be publicly disclosed and cause significant disruptions to your site.
- The community will no longer maintain documentation, automated tests, or packages for Drupal 7.
- Certain Drush features for Drupal 7 will stop working because the underlying drupal.org infrastructure will be shut down.
- The availability of Drupal.org file archives (tar and zip files) for Drupal 7 will be disabled.
- The core will no longer be maintained (no more core commits on Drupal core 7.x.)
- External vulnerability scans will flag Drupal 7 as insecure.
Start preparing now to migrate to Drupal 10
You’ve waited long enough; it’s time to act. Drupal 7 has served its purpose for 14 years—it’s time to think about upgrading.
Our agency, like all Drupal-specialized partners, is here to help you. You will benefit from:
- The ability to carry over certain configurations from your Drupal 7 site;
- Simplified migration of your content;
- The opportunity to rethink your user journeys and interfaces, since the entire theme will need to be redone;
- The satisfaction of having up-to-date, easily maintainable code;
- The relief of having an application sustainable for the long-term, as upgrades are now simpler.
Sources:
EOL Drupal 7 – https://www.drupal.org/about/drupal-7/end-of-life
Drupal 7 end-of-life announcement – https://www.drupal.org/psa-2023-06-07
For further reading:
Drupal 7 support extended by 12 months! - 02/28/2022
Obituary: End of life for Drupal 8 - 12/02/2021
The roadmap for Drupal 10 and how to prepare for it - 07/18/2021
The path to Drupal 9 – What’s new, migrating from Drupal 7 and 8 to 9 - 03/27/2020
