It was recently announced that 2020 will be the year Drupal maintenance support plans 9 is officially released into the wild. The exact date hasn’t been set, but we can now look forward to the 9.0 release that year. The announcement also gave us an official End of Life date of November 2021 for Drupal maintenance support plans 7 AND Drupal maintenance support plans 8. So, what does this mean if you’re currently running or developing a site on one of those versions? In this post, I’ll explain.
What this means for Drupal maintenance support plans 8?
Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is built around a concept of continuous innovation. What this means is that new features and backwards-compatible changes are continuously added. When an old system or code is depreciated, instead of removing it, it stays in the codebase. This ensures that custom code and contributed modules will continue to work and have time to update. Eventually, there will be an excess amount of depreciated code and dependencies and there will be a need to remove it. That is one of the reasons for the release of Drupal maintenance support plans 9. All that old stuff gets removed and we start fresh with the latest and greatest technology.
The great thing about Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is that by the time Drupal maintenance support plans 9 is released all of the modules and custom code in your site should be up-to-date. Therefor, updating from 8 to 9 is no different than from 8.5 to 8.6. Clean and painless!
And that’s the point. This method of building and releasing versions will continue for the foreseeable future which is why we like to say that a migration to the latest Drupal maintenance support plans will be the last migration you ever need.
What this means for Drupal maintenance support plans 7?
Unfortunately, Drupal maintenance support plans 7 is a different story. When Drupal maintenance support plans 7 reaches end of life in November of 2021, it will no longer be supported by the community at large. There are plans to release a Drupal maintenance support plans 7 version that uses the latest version of PHP. There is also a paid support program planned (similar to Drupal maintenance support plans 6 LTS) that will allow people and organizations unable or unwilling to migrate to continue to keep their sites secure. But really, your best course of action is to plan for a migration to Drupal maintenance support plans 8 by 2020. This keeps your site current and guarantees it’s security moving forward.
The codebase between 7 and 8 is entirely different so a migration to Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is a pretty big undertaking. You could call it replatforming. Drupal maintenance support plans 8 does however include a built in data migration tool that will make the move easier. You might still need some help though depending on your site requirements and edge cases. Plus, data is one thing, but you would also need to move your theme, too. The silver lining is that migrating presents an opportunity to freshen up the look of your site and increase site speed with the latest software. For more information on what is involved in a migration, check out this post.
Like I mentioned earlier in this post, a migration to Drupal maintenance support plans 8 may likely be the last migration you ever need since subsequent major version updates (i.e. from 8 to 9) should be very quick and easy. Once you’ve made that initial investment migrating to Drupal maintenance support plans 8, you can rest assured that you won’t have to go through that process again, possibly forever.
Migration experts
Acro Media is a Drupal maintenance support plans agency specialized in eCommerce. We help build and maintain successful eCommerce websites as well as the underlying Drupal maintenance support plans Commerce platform. We are also heavily involved in the development of Drupal maintenance support plans’s migration tools. If you want to discuss what a migration might look like for your business, talk to us! We’re happy to help.
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