Upgrade paths for your Drupal 7 website

Drupal 7 is nearing end of life (EOL) 

Drupal 7 will reach end-of-life (EOL) in November of 2022, which means that at least a half million webmasters & site owners have some decisions to make. What’s the next step for your organization’s website? What sorts of costs might you be looking at for this upgrade? What timeline can you plan on for this change? All good questions.

What is EOL and what does it mean to me?

The Drupal ecosystem of core and contributed modules is protected against hackers, data miners, automated exploits and other malicious actors by the Drupal Security Team — more than thirty developers working across three continents in almost a dozen countries to keep Drupal websites safe. The security team responds to reports of potential weaknesses in the Drupal core or contributed code and coordinates efforts to release new versions of the software that address those vulnerabilities.

The more than a million Drupal developers worldwide going about their day-to-day development tasks act as a passive network of quality control agents. Developers who discover security vulnerabilities while working with the code can confidentially report them so that the security team can go about fixing the problem before knowledge of the vulnerability is widely available. A million worldwide developers backing a thirty-something strong team of elite developers spells security — for your website, your data, and your organization.

In November of 2022, that all comes to an end for Drupal 7. That’s when the security team will officially retire from the Drupal 7 project in favor of modern versions of the platform. As new vulnerabilities in the code are discovered (and made public) you won’t have anyone in your corner to fight back with new security releases.

After EOL you can expect what’s left of the Drupal 7 community to move on, too. That means no new modules, new themes, or other new features built for the platform. It also means the pool of developers specializing in Drupal 7 starts to shrink very fast. If you’re still on Drupal 7 in late 2022, you’re out in the cold.

The good news is that there are options. Here are my top three picks:

Drupal 9: Drupal is dead, long live Drupal

Drupal 9 is the most modern iteration of the Drupal framework and CMS. It introduces a completely reimagined architecture and a rebuilt API more inline with modern development standards.

• Cost: High
• Build Time: High
• Longevity: High
• Support: High

Pros

Upgrading your site to the latest version of Drupal (9.1.10 at the time of this article) is, in most cases, the right move. Modern Drupal has grown to support a wide array of innovative features in core. Improved WYSIWYG content editing, a feature rich Media library, advanced publishing workflows, and rich JSON API are all available right out of the box. Couple that with Drupal’s new, highly modern architecture built on Symfony, the adoption of the Twig templating engine, and dependency management via Composer and you really do Build the best of the web in terms of technology, support, and longevity.

When you make the move to Drupal 9 you can count on Drupal’s huge and thriving community of developers (and security team) making the move right along with you. Existing modules from previous versions of Drupal are either — in almost all cases — already available, now packaged into core, or making their way to Drupal 9 at this moment. It’s very likely the agency you’re already working with has or is building a Drupal 9 proficiency, and it’s guaranteed that hundreds of other shops can pick up the slack in the odd case that your provider isn’t on board yet.

Finally, let’s not forget Drupal’s commitment to easy future upgrades which promises continuity in architecture that should facilitate easy upgrades to Drupal 10 and beyond. Gone are the days (probably) of “rebuild” style upgrades like those of Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, or Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9.

Cons

Speaking of “rebuild” style upgrades... upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 is one of them. While it could be your last major upgrade if you stick with Drupal for the long haul, moving from Drupal 7 to the more modern 8/9 and beyond architecture is a very heavy lift. For most organizations the move to Drupal 9 is the longest term, most feature-rich, most supported, and most modern option, but it generally entails a complete rebuild of your site’s backend and theme which basically means starting from scratch. Take a look at Joel’s post about the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 for more information — the process is comparable to a Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 upgrade.

Backdrop CMS: The same, but different

Backdrop CMS is a lightweight, flexible, and modernized platform built on Drupal 7 architecture with notable improvements. The software is a fork of the Drupal 7 code and boasts a simple, straightforward upgrade path.

• Cost: Low / Medium
• Build Time: Low / Medium
• Longevity: Medium / High
• Support: Medium

Pros

Drupal 7 sites moving to any other platform — including Drupal 8 / 9 — must be rebuilt. That’s not the case for Backdrop CMS, which gives you the option of protecting your investment in an existing Drupal 7 website and reaping the benefits of modern features like configuration management and advanced layout control. Backdrop CMS will prioritize backward compatibility with Drupal 7 until at least 2024, meaning that even fully custom Drupal 7 code — with very minor modifications — should work in the Backdrop CMS ecosystem. A large selection of widely used Drupal 7 modules are already available for Backdrop CMS, and more are on the way. And while backwards compatibility is a major selling point for Backdrop CMS, its architecture is forward thinking with the introduction of classed entities and an object-oriented approach to all of its new components and features.

While the Backdrop CMS developer community isn’t particularly large, Drupal 7 and Backdrop CMS development skill sets are virtually interchangeable for the time being due to the almost identical API. There’s also considerable overlap on the Drupal 8/9 front due to Backdrop’s preference for object-oriented code in all of its newly added features. That means your existing Drupal developers can help you make the switch, and while the upgrade process isn’t exactly seamless it’s definitely a far cry from a complete rebuild.

Backdrop CMS also has its own security team, which — for now at least — works closely with the Drupal security team. Active development for the current version of Backdrop CMS is planned through 2024 according to their Roadmap, with the next version of Backdrop CMS promising an even easier upgrade path compared to the Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS upgrade.

Cons

Backdrop CMS implements both Drupal 7 style procedural coding and Drupal 8/9 style object-oriented coding, which in theory means that it caters to a wide range of developers. In practice it’s hard to predict the future of any up-and-coming development community. That makes the outlook for long term support a little opaque, in that it’s hard to say just how many developers will be supporting Backdrop CMS and building new features for it down the road a couple of years.

Also, while Backdrop CMS absolutely prioritizes backwards compatibility with Drupal 7, a greater number of contributed and custom modules in your existing site could complicate the upgrade process. Simpler Drupal 7 sites with fewer contributed and custom modules would probably encounter a low effort to complete the upgrade, while a greater number of contributed and custom modules are likely to see a medium effort as some of those modules may need to be converted.

Drupal 7 Vender Extended Support: Don’t move a muscle

Drupal 7 ES is the do nothing for now option. A small collection of approved and vetted vendors will be providing security updates and / or critical patches for Drupal 7 core and contributed modules following a variety of vendor-specific plans.

Note: I added some material to this article after publication regarding the points identified with asterisks^*, based on feedback from an industry peer. Check it out at the bottom of the post.

• Cost: Low
• Build Time: None^*
• Longevity: Low / Medium
• Support: Medium

Pros

The biggest plus here is simple: No further action is required at this time.^* If you’re planning to work with a vendor that provides extended support for Drupal 7, you won’t need to take any action to protect your website from aging software until Drupal 7 EOL in 2022. At that point, you’ll need to plan on a flat or adjustable monthly fee through the end of 2025 — or possibly beyond. This could mean avoiding major financial decisions regarding your digital strategy for at least a few years, and all at a cost that (depending on the size of your organization / website) is probably a fraction of the cost of a software upgrade.

With the Drupal 7 EOL recently extended until November of 2022, many of these Vender Extended Support plans haven’t fully materialized — so details are still forthcoming. Agencies like Tag1Quo or MyDropWizard advertise services from a surprising $15 / month to $1250 / month for a range of beyond EOL Drupal support plans. Acquia and Lullabot are also named by Drupal.org as ES vendors — but without any specifics about pricing or support levels. While the picture isn’t entirely clear yet, availability of an affordable ES plan is virtually guaranteed by 2022.

Cons

Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support may protect you against vulnerabilities and exploits discovered after Drupal 7 EOL, but community support will be all but dead by that time. That means no new features or modules will be released and the pool of Drupal 7 developers will be rapidly drying up. Unless you have an in-house development team, you can plan on your website coming to a standstill in terms of new features.

The amount of contributed and custom modules your site implements has an impact here, too. The greater number of custom and contributed modules, the greater you can expect the effort to be in supporting those modules beyond EOL.

Another concern with Drupal 7 ES is PHP 7 end-of-life. Once PHP 7 (the language Drupal 7 is largely built on) is no longer supported towards the end of 2022, you can expect the security of your Drupal 7 site to rapidly degrade. Updating Drupal 7 to be compliant with the newer, more secure PHP 8 is doable — but could be a difficult process.

Finally, it’s likely that you will still need to consider upgrading to a supported platform in the future if your website will need to change and adapt in the coming years. You can expect this process to become more challenging as time goes on and the gap between your existing website and modern platforms grows ever larger.

Taking the first step

There are other options, too. Moving from Drupal 7 to another platform entirely (WordPress?) could make the most sense depending on the complexities of your website. Moving to a less robust CMS could be nominally more cost effective than an upgrade to Drupal 9, but it also bakes in some hard limitations to what your website will be able to do.

A lot of organizations are beginning to evaluate options for their Drupal 7 sites. The best way forward depends largely on your goals as an organization, your ambitions for your digital presence, and the amount of time and effort you’re willing to invest. We’d love to consider your questions or learn more about the specific challenges you’re facing as you sort through your options. Get in touch today with your questions about upgrade paths from Drupal 7.

Additional notes for Drupal 7 Vender Extended Support, added June 22, 2021:
"Build time: None" is not strictly accurate - users who choose Drupal 7 ES will probably need to install an update status module to inform their chosen vendor of version data for their core and contributed modules. They will also need to adopt a new update strategy as their module updates will be coming from a new source (their chosen vendor). These steps won't need to be taken until we're closer to Drupal 7 EOL - perhaps the Spring or Summer of 2022.

"No further action required at this time" may be misleading. Action will be required as we approach Drupal 7 EOL in the Spring or Summer of 2022 - namely choosing an ES vendor and following their instructions.