Happy March! If you’re reading this blog post on the day of publication, you now have exactly ten months to migrate out of Drupal 7 before it reaches end of life on January 5, 2025. After numerous extensions, this date is final and there will be no further extensions.
We at Chapter Three are experts at Drupal 7 to 10 migrations. We are an official D7 migration partner, certified by the Drupal Association for our recognized track record of migrations from D7. On August 15 of last year, the association launched a Drupal 7 End of Life (EOL) resource page with an EOL migration marketplace. We’re proud to be on this list and look forward to fulfilling your migration needs!
What Does End of Life (EOL) Mean?
It means that your site will no longer receive feature updates, bug fixes, or security patches. In other words, your site is vulnerable and you’re on your own for fixing problems and protecting it from online threats. The older your content management system gets, the more likely these types of issues will occur.
While there are technically eight months’ worth of Drupal 7 support left, support for many D7 modules and themes has already been discontinued. Drupal's security team has reduced its D7 support, with less critical issues simply posted in the public issue queue.
If you’re still using Drupal 7, it’s only going to get more challenging to maintain your site. You might fear that migrating to Drupal 10 will be complicated and costly, but you can be sure that keeping it in Drupal 7 will make it even more difficult and expensive to maintain. It would also keep you frozen in time – missing out on a plethora of new features in Drupal 10.
What Does Drupal 10 Have to Offer?
We’ve talked extensively about D10’s offerings, including a deep dive into Drupal 10.1, which came out last June. Drupal 10.2 came out in December and features new improvements for site building including better UX for field creation, more block placement controls, and performance enhancements such as support for PHP 8.3 and improved caching.
By the time we reach Drupal 7’s EOL cutoff, we will be in the era of Drupal 11. ETAs for its release range from an ambitious June 2024 to a more conservative December 2024. According to Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, objectives for D11 include providing more enhanced tools for site builders and content editors, as well as making Drupal easier to update and maintain, including an automatic update feature.
Drupal continues to get better and better and migration doesn’t have to be scary. We have considerable experience helping clients move out of D7. No matter how complicated your web ecosystem, we can get you migrated ahead of the EOL cutoff date, but not if you wait much longer.
A Good Time to Go Headless
If you’re taking the time to migrate to D10, you could also take the opportunity to truly modernize your site with a decoupled front-end and a composable stack.
We’ve made the case for going headless with Drupal on the back-end and our Next.js-powered Next-Drupal platform on the front-end, together with flexible Vercel front-end hosting and versatile Amazee.io back-end hosting.
Looking for greater speed for your website? Decoupling it will put you in a whole new league, speed-wise, while improving performance in other ways, like the ability to weather enormous traffic spikes without compromising performance. Decoupling also gives you an extra layer of security while improving scalability. There’s also an expanded pool of developer talent that comes with shifting to Next.js, specialists of which significantly outnumber Drupal.
Just as Drupal is advancing, Next-Drupal is also getting more sophisticated. Next-Drupal 2.0 is now in alpha mode and will be ready for general adoption soon. This version makes an already fast front-end even faster by allowing users to render some React components on the server side. It also provides a more developer-friendly experience with its new Draft Mode.
Check out Some Examples
Here's a short list of Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 migrations and decoupled projects that we've completed recently: Oregon Law Help, California Superior Courts, BART.gov, California State University at Bakersfield, and The Shops at Santa Anita.
Take the Next Step
There has never been a better time to migrate – especially if you use the opportunity to make a quantum leap in site performance, scalability, security, and usability. Contact us today to get the ball rolling on your Drupal 7 migration!
