Marjorie De Schepper
Drupal 7 is still widely used on the web. You'll find it in government agencies, educational institutions, and it forms the digital backbone for many businesses and non-profits. Drupal 9 is feature rich, but many organizations still rely on Drupal 7.
Drupal 7 will be re-evaluated annually and the End Of Life of Drupal 7 has now been delayed back to November 2023.
The Drupal Project Lead (Dries Buytaert), the Drupal Association and the Drupal Security Working Group have been monitoring the Drupal 7 ecosystem since the previous end-of-life extension. Since the majority of all sites in the Drupal project are still running on Drupal 7, they decided that there is a need to provide additional support to community members still using this version.
During this support extension, Drupal 7 will continue to receive security updates, with releases published as usual on Drupal.org and available in the update manager. The current end-of-life date is cancelled and extended until at least November 2023.
The Drupal Project Lead, the Drupal Security Working Group and the Drupal Association will meet regularly to evaluate the state of Drupal 7 based on a number of criteria yet to be determined.
By July 2023, they will announce whether they will extend support for the Drupal 7 community for one year. Some factors they will consider:
The current support is made possible thanks to the many Drupal 7 administrators and companies who pay to support Drupal 7.
Beware! PHP 8 is coming. That will cause a lot of modules to be unsupported in Drupal 7 if they are not also updated.
Still, there are good reasons to switch to Drupal 9. Discover them in these articles.
