Should Drupal 7 support be extended again?
Drupal 7, which was released in 2011, was originally supposed to be end-of-life in November 2022.
This would mean there would be no more Drupal 7 versions and there would be no further support or bug fixes from the core Developer team.
However, in February 2022, support was extended until November 2023 with a potential for it to be extended by another 12 months, which would be announced by July 2023.
There are still over 425,000 active Drupal 7 websites according to https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal - almost 100,000 fewer than Feburary 2022. That's still a lot of websites!
Should support be extended again or should Drupal 7 be marked as end-of-life and unsupported?
If so, those websites will continue to work, and an argument could be made that there's been enough time to upgrade projects since Drupal 8's first release in 2015.
That said, it's a tricky upgrade - migrating data into a new Drupal website and re-writing custom modules and themes to make them compatible.
It's definitely work upgrading, in my opinion, as the updates between Drupal 8, 9 and 10 are much simpler and quicker, and don't involve large rewrites or data migrations.
Hit reply and let me know what you think.
P.S. Are you still using Drupal 7 and don’t know what’s involved to upgrade to Drupal 10? Book a Drupal 7 upgrade consultation call.
- Oliver
