Drupal 7’s life is extended one more year. This is the message from Drupal core today. D7 will no longer be supported after November 1, 2023. In addition to this announcement, core stated that they intend to check in yearly on this deadline and make changes as they see fit.
Drupal 7 has been around for over a decade and its end of life was already extended once. It’s still the most widely used version of Drupal out there, something alluded to in today’s announcement, saying:
“The teams that built and still maintain these legacy Drupal installations, and the end users they serve, are important constituents of the Drupal community. Although these users should still plan their upgrade to a newer version of Drupal, if they are unable to upgrade before the currently announced end-of-life, it would not be responsible of us to leave them vulnerable.”
Having an extra year to get together the budget and team for a migration is, of course, great news. The move to D9 from D7 is a big haul. But D7 is more than a decade old and its age is starting to show.
There’s so much to look forward to in D9, it is more usable, accessible, inclusive, flexible and scalable than previous versions. But just because core is extending the deadline, it doesn’t mean that the contrib modules you rely on are going to continue to be supported.
