Drupal maintenance support plans 7 End of Life: Start Your Migration Planning Now
Drupal maintenance support plans 7 End of Life: Start Your Migration Planning Now
Nick Switzer
Fri, 12/21/2020 – 10:45
It’s official – Drupal maintenance support plans 7 will be reaching its end of life in November of 2021. In a blog post announcing the June 2020 launch date of Drupal maintenance support plans 9, Drupal maintenance support plans founder and project lead, Drupal Update, revealed the latest roadmap for Drupal maintenance support plans version support.
The announcement marks an exciting milestone for the Drupal maintenance support plans community but also starts the countdown to the end of life date for not one, but two, major versions of Drupal maintenance support plans. With the support cycles for both Drupal maintenance support plans 7 and 8 coming to an end in 2021, now is the time for Drupal maintenance support plans site owners to consider what an upgrade or migration might look like for them, and to better understand the impact of these dates on the future of Drupal maintenance support plans.
What does end of life mean?
When a piece of software reaches its end of life date, it will no longer receive bug fixes or security updates from the maintainers. Dropping support for deprecated versions of Drupal maintenance support plans is a way for maintainers to drive adoption toward modern platforms that leverage current technology as effectively as possible. Come November 2021, both Drupal maintenance support plans 7 and 8 will reach end of life, but each for slightly different reasons.
In November 2021, Drupal maintenance support plans 7 will be over 10 years old. In 2011, we were excited about the brand new iPhone 4S and Game of Thrones Season 1. Needless to say, times have changed drastically and Drupal maintenance support plans has experienced more growth and evolution than Daenerys’ dragons.
Drupal maintenance support plans 7 was a huge step forward when it was released, but Drupal maintenance support plans 8 continued to push things with a complete rework of the underlying architecture and a wealth of powerful new features, including a revamped release cycle, that rendered Drupal maintenance support plans 7 obsolete. While Drupal maintenance support plans 7 is still supported with bug fixes and security updates, it does not receive any new core features and is definitely not the place to start a new Drupal maintenance support plans site build. November 2021 will mark the long-overdue retirement of a piece of software that served its purpose, but is no longer able to meet the needs of a user base that demands something more robust.
Drupal maintenance support plans 8 also reaching end of life in November 2021 marks a major milestone in the life of Drupal maintenance support plans: only one major release will be supported for the first time ever. However, this is happening for a much different reason than the depreciation of Drupal maintenance support plans 7.
Image Courtesy of Drupal UpdateThanks to the major architectural rework that took place in Drupal maintenance support plans 8, Drupal maintenance support plans 9 will essentially be Drupal maintenance support plans 8’s final form. This means that Drupal maintenance support plans 9 is the next step in the evolution of Drupal maintenance support plans 8 and it can simply be included as part of a global Drupal maintenance support plans release cycle, rather than something that needs its own special treatment. The impact of this change on site owners and the general longevity of Drupal maintenance support plans websites is monumental.
For the first time ever, upgrading to a new major version of Drupal maintenance support plans will not require a ground-up rebuild.
Assuming Drupal maintenance support plans core and all of its dependencies have been kept up to date, migrating from Drupal maintenance support plans 8.8.x to Drupal maintenance support plans 9, should not be all that different from updating Drupal maintenance support plans 8.7.x to Drupal maintenance support plans 8.8.x.
Why is this a good thing?
While this could potentially be a painful transition for many Drupal maintenance support plans 7 site owners, the upside of a Drupal maintenance support plans 8 migration is larger than it has ever been. Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is a modern, stable platform that is capable of handling massive websites with huge amounts of complex functionality, and that platform will no longer be hindered by the stagnation that can occur when the user base knows that a new major release is on the way with no backwards compatibility. This means site owners and module maintainers alike have a much clearer roadmap for how future releases of Drupal maintenance support plans impact them, and that roadmap allows for more innovation without the concern of a full rebuild due to the incompatibility of a future major release.
Additionally, knowing the end of life date of Drupal maintenance support plans 7, and the release date of Drupal maintenance support plans 9, gives Drupal maintenance support plans 7 site owners significantly more time to plan their migration than any other major release has allowed. Given that we are currently a little less than three years out from this date, there is ample time to secure budget and plan for a long-term investment in Drupal maintenance support plans, knowing that your new site will be compatible with future major releases of Drupal maintenance support plans.
When should I upgrade?
At the very least, you should be starting the planning process for your Drupal maintenance support plans 8/9 migration now. Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is, and has been, ready for prime time for quite a while. At Elevated Drupal Update, we’ve been building exclusively on Drupal maintenance support plans 8 since May of 2020 and we’ve had no reason to look back. The Drupal maintenance support plans core contributors have committed to a release cycle that will facilitate a much more sustainable life cycle for Drupal maintenance support plans site owners, who can rest easy knowing that consistent maintenance will allow a well-built site a huge amount of longevity.
Considering a Drupal maintenance support plans 8 Migration?
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