We are technology experts who use the web platform Drupal to build cutting edge technological solutions to a plethora of business challenges.
Written in PHP, Drupal is an excellent open source content management framework and reported to be one of the most top 5 most commonly used systems. It’s estimated that at 71.5% of the Drupal websites use Drupal 7 as their back-end framework. If your website is one of the 71.5%, we thought that you should know that from November 2021, Drupal 7 will no longer be supported – this includes bug fixes and security. This may feel frustrating, but the technology was introduced back in 2011 and through Drupal 8, things have evolved for the better and as we know, innovation is heartbeat of the tech industry.
Some of our own customers have websites built using Drupal 7. We’ve migrated some of these onto Drupal 8 already but for the remaining ones, we will continue to discuss options in good time. In our view, time is the key to planning for success and could provide the opportunity for some welcome change. Some Drupal 7 website owners will take the decision to make the changes they’ve been thinking about when they upgrade to Drupal 8. Others may be happy with where they are at, so will go for a straight upgrade.
What are the benefits of Drupal 8?
Introduced in 2015, Drupal 8 has a completely reworked underlying architecture to meet the ever-changing demands of the web. At the same time, a reworked release cycle was introduced which regularly and efficiently keeps Drupal 8 up to date. This reworked release cycle means that the transition to Drupal 9 will be a minor version update and should not require a website re-build. We’ve been using Drupal 8 for some time and are really excited by the new opportunities it presents in our brilliant industry.
If you need any advice around the Drupal 7 phase out, we’d be happy to chat.