Drupal 9 in 2020. What that means for Drupal 7 and 8

It was recently announced that 2020 will be the year Drupal 9 is officially released into the wild. The exact date hasn’t been set, but we can now look forward to the 9.0 release that year. The announcement also gave us an official end-of-life date of November 2022 for Drupal 7 and November 2021 for Drupal 8. So, what does this mean if you’re currently running or developing a site on one of those versions? In this post, I’ll explain.

What does this mean for Drupal 8?

Drupal 8 is built around a concept of continuous innovation. What this means is that new features and backwards-compatible changes are continuously added. When an old system or code is depreciated, it stays in the codebase instead of removing it. This ensures that custom code and contributed modules will continue to work and have time to update. Eventually, there will be an excessive amount of depreciated code and dependencies and there will be a need to remove it. That is one of the reasons for the release of Drupal 9. All that old stuff gets removed and we start fresh with the latest and greatest technology.

The great thing about Drupal 8 is that by the time Drupal 9 is released all of the modules and custom code in your site should be up-to-date. Therefore, updating 8 to 9 is no different from 8.5 to 8.6. Clean and painless!

And that’s the point. This method of building and releasing versions will continue for the foreseeable future which is why we like to say that a migration to the latest Drupal will be the last migration you ever need.

What does this mean for Drupal 7?

Unfortunately, Drupal 7 is a different story. When Drupal 7 reaches end-of-life in November of 2023, it will no longer be supported by the community at large. There are plans to release a Drupal 7 version that uses the latest version of PHP. There is also a paid support program planned (similar to Drupal 6 LTS) that will allow people and organizations unable or unwilling to migrate to continue to keep their sites secure. But really, your best course of action is to plan for a migration to Drupal 8 by 2020. This keeps your site current and guarantees its security moving forward.

The codebase between 7 and 8 is entirely different, so migrating to Drupal 8 is a pretty big undertaking. You could call it replatforming. Drupal 8 does however include a built-in data migration tool that will make the move easier. You might still need some help though depending on your site requirements and edge cases. Plus, data is one thing, but you would also need to move your theme, too. The silver lining is that migrating presents an opportunity to freshen up the look of your site and increase site speed with the latest software. For more information on what is involved in a migration, check out this post.

Like I mentioned earlier in this post, migration to Drupal 8 may likely be the last migration you ever need since subsequent major version updates (i.e. from 8 to 9) should be very quick and easy. Once you’ve made that initial investment migrating to Drupal 8, you can rest assured that you won't have to go through that process again, possibly forever.

Migration experts

Acro Commerce is a Drupal agency specialized in eCommerce. We help build and maintain successful eCommerce websites as well as the underlying Drupal Commerce platform. We are also heavily involved in the development of Drupal’s migration tools. If you want to discuss what a migration might look like for your business, talk to us! We’re happy to help.