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Drupal 7 Will Reach End-of-Life in November of 2021 (drupal.org)

Posted by msmash on from the end-of-life dept.

Drupal 7, which was first released in January 2011, will reach end of life (EOL) in November of 2021, the Drupal Association said today. What this means for your Drupal 7 sites is, as of November 2021: 1. Drupal 7 will no longer be supported by the community at large. The community at large will no longer create new projects, fix bugs in existing projects, write documentation, etc. around Drupal 7.
2. There will be no more core commits to Drupal 7.
3. The Drupal Security Team will no longer provide support or Security Advisories for Drupal 7 core or contributed modules, themes, or other projects. Reports about Drupal 7 vulnerabilities might become public creating 0 day exploits.
4. All Drupal 7 releases on all project pages will be flagged as not supported. Maintainers can change that flag if they desire to.
5. On Drupal 7 sites with the update status module, Drupal Core will show up as unsupported.
6. After November 2021, using Drupal 7 may be flagged as insecure in 3rd party scans as it no longer gets support.
7. Best practice is to not use unsupported software, it would not be advisable to continue to build new Drupal 7 sites.
8. Now is the time to start planning your migration to Drupal 8.

46 comments

  1. Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    EOL the whole project, in fact.

    1. Re: Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, totally this, was going to log in to comment, but you already beat me to it. EOL all of drupal and make the internet a safer place.

    2. Re: Good by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      Which one would be better: EOL Drupal or EOL WordPress?
      Let's say you can only ban one from the internet.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    3. Re: Good by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Which one would be better: EOL Drupal or EOL WordPress?
      Let's say you can only ban one from the internet.

      It has to be WordPress. Drupal is far from perfect, but WP is even farther.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re: Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Indeed. Kill it.

      The private lives of contributors--assuming that they keep it between consenting adults--should be none of the project's business.

      https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/13/drupal_gor_protest/

        https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/29/drupal_dev_banished/

    5. Re: Good by CaptnCrud · · Score: 3, Informative

      Moot. They're both equally fucked.

    6. Re: Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What would you suggest? Honestly, I'm looking for alternatives.

    7. Re: Good by xonen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I suggest not to listen to strangers on the internet ranting about something from their boycave, and just use what fits your needs best.

      Yes i dislike WP too. And drupal too. Any CMS really. But when i have to make a website for the boss, i just pull one of them of the shelve and get the job done. Preferably one that's still supported in 5 year, depending on the site. Anything mission-critical is not made with such CMS anyways, it serves another purpose and another market and pretty much any of them does what it needs to do. Just like your smartphone - when was the last time you seriously cared about the brand of phone as long it worked?

      --
      A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
    8. Re: Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Moot.

      He works for Google now.

    9. Re: Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ok, I will listen to you and do what you say.... hey wait a minute. You're a stranger on the internet ranting about something. No, I'm NOT going to listen to you. But by NOT listening to you I will in fact do exactly you told me to do, so therefor I WILL do what you told me to do but then by listening to you I will..... arrrrrrghh! [head asplodes]

    10. Re: Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Honestly?

      SilverStripe.

      Our firm switched from Drupal to SilverStripe years ago, and sweet jesus is everyone involved happier. We produce better work that is easer to maintain (and reuse code from) in less time.

      Extremely well written, bends over backwards to make development easier, super intuitive admin UI. Everyone loves it from designers to devs to end users.

      The downside? The user community is a drop in the bucket compared to "the big 3", so it's not always as easy to google the answer to something.

    11. Re: Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sucking the ol Acquia cock or something?

      Wordpress is shit, but at least it lets fools update through the admin interface rather than require hiring an overpriced outsourced development team because your modules are fucked on every manual upgrade.

    12. Re: Good by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Wordpress is shit, but at least it lets fools update through the admin interface rather than require hiring an overpriced outsourced development team because your modules are fucked on every manual upgrade.

      I've been running Drupal since 4.somethingorother and upgrades have been largely smooth throughout. Maybe I'm just good at picking modules. But this 7-8 transition isn't working for me. I've got a couple years before I actually have to convert, so maybe they'll get migration working correctly by then.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    13. Re: Good by xonen · · Score: 1

      Usually i write 'including me' when i make that statement but you figured it out. Sorry bout your head though.

      --
      A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
  2. I've Never Used Drupal. AMA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    eom

    1. Re:I've Never Used Drupal. AMA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And I've never even heard of Drupal outside of Slashdot.

  3. Remember to avoid offending anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    During your move to Drupal 8 - certainly don't admit to holding any views contrary to Drupal's "community" norms. And if you threaten Dries IPO prospects in ANY way, watch the Drupal org break all of their stated principles to burn you.

    1. Re:Remember to avoid offending anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Spoken like a good little sheep.

    2. Re:Remember to avoid offending anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      If you're a cunt you deserve those consequences.

      Except Drupal sided with the stalker and doxxer and punished the victim because the perpetrators felt "uncomfortable".

    3. Re:Remember to avoid offending anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Drupal (Dries) also admitted to (in now-deleted blog posts) that he was kicking the victim out because he didn't like his sexual preferences. The now "official" story is that removal was because of secret information Drupal has - Drupal apparently knows better than ALL other official agencies who had looked into accusations over the years (police, social services, etc.).

    4. Re:Remember to avoid offending anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lol just because you aren't smart enough to get along with others doesn't mean everyone isn't.

    5. Re:Remember to avoid offending anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Rule of Anonymous Cowards: Coders got to code and posers got to pose! There's always another more interesting, more fun, open-source project to contribute to.

    6. Re:Remember to avoid offending anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly. Making someone feel 'uncomfortable' is the new tool of oppression. But, that's okay because it is only be the social outcasts that get affected by this, right? We could require these individuals to wear a letter. D for deviant, P for pervert/perversions, and A for Aspberger's (or Autism). We'll make it red for the highest visibility. We'll test for it in school, to keep the uncomfortable-makers from getting ahead in society. I wonder why no one's thought of this before?

  4. bunch of stuff by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    when i decided to learn a cms it dawned on me that the archiles heel would be the content storage backend -aka- the database.
    i do hope that the database table layout created and populated by a drupal7 is 100% compatible with drupal8.
    else its either writing some code that does the acrobatics of transforming a d7 database into a d8 compatible one -or- if its not too big, *sigh* recreating by reentering all data by hand.
    go SQLite! (crosses fingers)

    1. Re:bunch of stuff by ls671 · · Score: 3, Informative

      No it is not!

      There are migration scripts available but your mileage may vary especially if you wrote custom stuff. Third party modules may also be a concern.

      https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/...

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
  5. Stop obsolescence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I wish software (especially open source) would stop this entire make-busy regression where software canâ(TM)t be made âoegood enoughâ so letâ(TM)s throw out everything in favor of a new fork which does more things to make-busy.

    Clearly drupal 7 works good enough that it is suitable for sites to use for 10 years. Why push for 8? Probably due to feature rot/code creep. Partuiculary by being forced to use PHP7.x

    1. Re:Stop obsolescence by hierofalcon · · Score: 2

      Drupal 7 runs on php7.2.

      It does require money and time to do security analysis on old code. That is a fact of life. They're looking at migrating to Drupal 9 down the road, and 7 will be EOL'd. They're giving a long time duration warning for when EOL will happen.

      That said, I haven't looked to see how many Drupal 7 modules haven't yet or won't be ported to Drupal 8. The module support is Drupal's Achilles heel if anything. The core isn't awful to move from release to release. But when large numbers of add-on modules are unsupported in the next release because the Drupal developers have changed things in annoying ways (even if for perfectly good reasons) it makes it tough to upgrade end user websites if there is no comparable functionality. You either drop those features or hope for the best, or if the functionality has been merged with core, you do a big database alteration to try to get the old functionality with the new core. With the number of severe security holes in 8 and 7 lately, hoping for the best isn't a good plan.

    2. Re:Stop obsolescence by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      Perhaps they should spend some time to migrate drupal.org off of Drupal 7.63

      Why would you upgrade to 8 if the creators of it won't upgrade their own site?

  6. considering all the holes, might be better worded: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Now is the time to start planning^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H your migration to something else

  7. Sounds Tibetan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Or from that region of the planet. Is it perchance from the Pakistan?

  8. How unfortunate by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    I've tried to migrate my site to D8, and the body content isn't displayed, and nobody on the forum responded at all. What a PITA. Guess I should get on that a bit more.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re:How unfortunate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed, we had similar problems. With D7 everything works fine, plus there are thousands of modules that actually work with it (unlike D8).

  9. People still use Drupal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I haven't even thought about in months... I mean I'm glad people are choosing something that isn't the steaming pile of U+1F4A9 that is WordPress, but...

    Isn't it time for something new? Better? Perhaps not written in PHP? Perhaps written by actual software developers and not web designers who need someplace to sell their themes?

    1. Re:People still use Drupal? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      ExpressionEngine 5 is now open source. Seeing some of their (stupid/dumb) design decisions, I'd say these guys have more of a database background than a web designer background.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  10. RIP Drupal by future+assassin · · Score: 1

    and I for one would like to welcome our new resurrected Drupal overlord called Backdrop CMS

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
    1. Re:RIP Drupal by Asteconn · · Score: 1

      Our web shop has completely ceased using drupal for new websites now; we've tried drupal 8 and it simply doesn't fit the needs for our customers. Our upgrade path will be to Backdrop

    2. Re:RIP Drupal by future+assassin · · Score: 1

      As someone who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag I manged to create some pretty nice and complex websites with D7. Then D8 came along and was like WTF? Can't even install it on a shared host with out having shell access. Discovered Backdrop and its pretty nice although had to go to Wordpress/Woocommerce as Ubercart is just not feature rich and the Commerce port has stagnated.

      --
      by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
  11. Re:creimer misunderstood by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Creimer gave $71 to Second Harvest Food Bank to stick it to VOX Media and The Verge. #SomethingPositive

  12. drupal.org isn't dogfooding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    According to the makefiles in https://bitbucket.org/account/user/drupalorg-infrastructure/projects/PROJ, drupal.org is itself still using Drupal 7. Despite Drupal 8.0.0 being released in November 2015. I won't feel comfortable migrating my Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8 until the Drupal.org infrastructure team is confident enough in the 8.x branch to eat their own dogfood.

    Meanwhile, groups.drupal.org appears to be using a patched version of Drupal 6, which went EOL in February 2016.

    Is the November 2021 Drupal 7 EOL going to be a "Hard Drexit" or a "Soft Drexit"?

    CAPTCHA: taking

  13. So cancel 8 already by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The best way to improve Drupal would be to start over in a different language and name it something else.
    "Wordpress. At least it's not Drupal"
    The best way to improve Wordpress would be to migrate all the sites to static pages or Wix, depending on tolerance of nausea. And budget.

    Yes I do both. I'm a whore, not a holy warrior.

  14. Will it be on Netflix? by Prien715 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Does that mean I can't catch season 6 of Drupal's drag race on Netflix?

    --
    -- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
  15. Migration path? by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    How straightforward is the migration path?

    My previous experience of Drupal (a long time ag) was that it was easy to setup a gorgeous site, but that making it is update-prone was not a layman's job. Odds were good that it would need a complete reimplementation.

  16. Drupal and Contributed Modules by SAH · · Score: 1

    I have several web sites running Drupal 7. The biggest issue that prevents me from migrating to Drupal 8 is the status of several contributed modules that I depend on. If they don't have a Drupal 8 version available (and there are many that don't), I have to either update them myself or find an alternative. The most common reaction I get from the developers of these modules when asked about their plans for Drupal 8 is silence...