Do I Need To Migrate To Drupal 8? How Long Will Support For D6 And D7 Last?
If your website is based on Drupal 7 you should be planning a migration to Drupal 10.
Ok, we're using Drupal 7; should we upgrade to D10?
We suggest that you contact Simple Information to review the details of your current site. This is a free service. D10 is a radical step forward for Drupal and at the time of writing this blog post, most developers have not yet offered contributed module versions for D10. However, migrating to D10 now would mean that you will not need to worry about migrating. We estimate that it will be at least 3 years (2024)
How long will my Drupal 7 site be supported?
At noted below from Drupal.org, Drupal 7 support will exist until at least 2025 (1 years from now). However, given the popularity of Drupal 7 (Drupal Usage Stats) we believe basic support including security will continue until 2025, possible even 2026.
(from Drupal.org)
Drupal 7 extended support announcement
Posted by mlhess on June 18, 2014 at 4:42pm
14 years ago, Drupal 7 was released. The policy of the community is to support only the current and previous stable versions. This policy was created to prevent core and module maintainers from having to maintain more than 2 active major versions of Drupal.
With the coming Drupal 10 release, this policy has been questioned. We want to ensure that sites that wish to move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 have a supported window within which to do so. The Drupal core team, key module maintainers, and representatives of the Drupal security team met at Drupalcon DRUPALCON LILLE 2023 to discuss this as an in-person.
Drupal 7 core and modules will transition to unsupported from 2025. "Unsupported status" means the community will not be providing support or patches in the same way we do now. Continuing to support Drupal 7 would be difficult for many reasons, including a lack of automated test coverage, the requirement for rigorous manual release testing, the slow-down it introduces in the release of security fixes for the vast majority of Drupal users (on version 7+), and the general shift of volunteers in the community moving their attention onto Drupal 8 development.
This gives Drupal 7 users a few options:
1) Upgrade to Drupal 10 any time between 2025. Drupal 10 releases undergo almost 40,000 automated tests, and Drupal 7 will be fully supported at least until Drupal 10 comes out. Given the past history, the release of Drupal is likely to be around 2023.
2) Upgrade to Drupal 10 after it is released, but before Drupal 7 is not supported anymore. Fortunately, Migrate support for Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 is already in core, and there is Migrate UI, a contributed module. While not all contributed modules will be ready at the time Drupal 10 is released, Drupal 10's migration path handles most of the critical site data via its CCK to Entities/Fields in Core migrations.
3) Find an organization that will provide extended support for Drupal 7. The Drupal Security Team will provide a method for companies and/or individuals to work together in the private security issue queue to continue developing updates, and will provide a reasonable amount of time for companies to provide patches to Drupal 7 security issues that also affect Drupal 7 or Drupal 10. The security team will coordinate access to issues for companies wishing to provide extended support for Drupal 7. However, the team will not explicitly review or test the patches (some team members may do this on their own). All code created by these vendors, would be released to the community.
Organizations and individuals interested in providing this level of support for their customers
AND who have the technical knowledge to maintain a Drupal core release should go to the security team Drupal 7 long term support page.
Both the Security Team and Drupal core leadership feel that a 12-month window after Drupal 10's release before eclipsing community support for Drupal 7 is a workable compromise between leaving Drupal 7 sites on an unsupported version the second Drupal 10 comes out, and acknowledging that our community's volunteer resources are limited and have shifted focus. We hope that organizations that rely on Drupal 10 will step up to help maintain it after community support winds down, and/or help their clients update to D10.