Retirement of Drupal 7

Tuesday 29 March 2022

We’re on track with our plans to retire from the GovCMS D7 Distribution (GovCMSD7) on 28 November 2022. 

While Drupal recently announced an extension to its Drupal 7 End-of-Life program to 1 November 2023 there will be no changes to our timeline.  We will continue as planned to retire GovCMSD7 at the end of this year. 

GovCMS will continue with the November 2022 timeframe due to potential support issues that will start to arise as outlined below.  Additionally, we will need to invest our resources into providing functional improvements and new service offerings for GovCMS D9:

  • Drupal 7 modules may be left unfixed and will no longer be supported by the security team as the Drupal community shift their efforts towards maintaining Drupal 9 and, eventually, Drupal 10 modules.
  • PHP 7.4 will reach end of life in November 2022. Even though Drupal 7 Core can support PHP 8, some Drupal 7 contrib modules may have issues with this version which may lead to broken features on your site.

There are benefits about moving across to Drupal 9 (D9). It offers your site a secure and stable environment and enables your website to be ready for the next transition to Drupal 10, also on the horizon. 

 

GovCMS top priority is supporting you with the transition to D9. We have a lot happening on the distro roadmap this year including the GovCMS Drupal 10 distribution.  We encourage you to continue with redevelopment plans and migration of your website across to D9.

If you haven’t already started, we encourage you to start planning the move now. Get in touch, to discuss your D7 to D9 plans.

If you would like advice or help with planning to migrate your website to D9, visit our website or reach out.

Even though the timeline has been extended by Drupal, we will work closely with you to get migrations completed in the coming 8 months.