What 2020 Means For Your Drupal 7 or 8 Site

What is End-of-Life

“End-of-life” (EOL) means that a software application is no longer supported. That is, no more bug fixes, security updates or feature additions. Staying on an outdated platform is risky, even if your organization is on a tight budget. Without security updates, your website and hosting infrastructure could be vulnerable to new exploits. Problems with compatibility and technical limitations are other possibilities when using unsupported software. 

This upcoming transitional period means that organizations whose sites are on Drupal 6 or 7 need to migrate to Drupal 8, with the end goal of moving to Drupal 9 before late 2021.  Depending on the size and complexity of your website, migrating to Drupal 8 can be a substantial effort. 

Consider it an Opportunity

While migration is a major undertaking, it provides an opportunity to improve your site’s design, functionality, content and administrative experience. Website integration with external tools like CRMs, ticketing, donations and membership systems or museum collections management platforms can be assessed during this process and enhanced as a result of improvements introduced in Drupal 8.

When planning your Drupal 8 migration, consider embarking on a comprehensive redesign process that evaluates the site against your organization’s goals and audience needs. Tactics such as stakeholder and user interviews, user testing, analytics assessments, and accessibility audits can be incorporated into the migration planning process to define key improvements to your web presence.

Our Recommendations

If you haven’t started already, it’s time to start planning for the move to Drupal 8. Drupal’s release timeline provides guidance as to what to do and when.
 

• Now: Start planning your site’s migration to Drupal 8. Consider the opportunity to invest in a site redesign as part of this migration. Drupal 8 presents robust new functionality and various useful improvements.
• Late 2020 to early 2021: Complete your migration to Drupal 8 by early 2021. Drupal 9 will be released in late 2020.
• 2021: Keep the Drupal 8 website up to date and follow the upgrade path to Drupal 9 before the November 2021 end-of-life date.

You may be asking: Shouldn’t I just wait until Drupal 9 is released? I don’t want to have to upgrade again so soon after I upgrade to 8? The short answer is, no. 

Drupal 9 has been designed specifically to support backward compatibility and facilitate migrations from version 8. The upgrade path to Drupal 9 is vastly improved and will be a much simpler process than between Drupal 7 and Drupal 9. In fact, Drupal recommends against skipping version 8.

If your site is already on Drupal 8, the best thing you can do to make your site easy to upgrade is to keep it up-to-date. This means ensuring the website is continually updated with version releases and security updates. That way when the time comes, an upgrade to Drupal 9 can follow the recommended path which will be akin to a minor version update and less like a full migration and upgrade.

An Alternative Approach

If a migration or redesign isn’t in the cards for your organization within the next 12 months, there are options to keep your Drupal site secure and functioning until migration and rebuild becomes feasible. We currently offer an LTS (Long Term Support) program to clients whose websites are still on Drupal version 6, which reached end-of-life in 2016. We anticipate providing the same service for Drupal 7 at its end-of-life.

In Summary

• Start now to complete your Drupal 8 migration by early 2021.
• Consider a comprehensive website redesign process to evaluate and improve your web presence. 
• After you’ve migrated to Drupal 8, keep your site up-to-date.
• Make an easy upgrade from version 8 to 9 during the year between the release of Drupal 9 and the 2021 EOL dates.
• If you can’t do any of the above, we can help support your current site in the meantime.