Drupal 7 EOL on 5th of January 2025

Drupal 7 will be retired on January 5, 2025 after 14 years and this time the date is likely to be final, making an upgrade to Drupal 10 or a complete system switch unavoidable if you don't want to pay extra for support.

There is not much time left for either and I think it is unlikely that the end of support will be extended again. The last two extensions were well-founded. This time the reason would probably be YOLO. Despite two extensions, we didn't quite find the time yet ... in a couple of years.

5 months is more than enough for a smaller site, but for a large site with significant customizations, it will be tight. Anyone who has shied away from this until now has to take action immediately.

The figures from July are catastrophic. 7.x is still the most widely used version and it really shouldn't even exist anymore. We're in the grace period after the extension. Upgrading from 7 to 10 or changing systems is a lot of work. But we're talking about years in which obviously not much has happened.

Of the 730,000 installations tracked, just under 145,000 are on a version that they should be on. 7.x alone still has almost 300,000 installations. That's more than twice as many. Not a problem at the moment, but if it's still like that in January, there it will be a quite interesting problem.

What exactly is going wrong here? Drupal is primarily an "agency system" and is also primarily of interest to larger installations. Hobby installations and your mom's flower shop tend to run on Wordpress or something even more simple and there are good reasons for this. In the "upper segment" Drupal doubles in numbers, while Wordpress loses a lot of ground. There are good reasons for this too.

How can it be that in such an ecosystem nothing happens and everything seems to be leading to a crash test?

I don't quite get it. At least from my experience it's not the customers who "don't want to". Are there skill issues here and agencies are better off keeping their mouth shut because they would have to do it? I can actually imagine that with the 7.x problems because we're not talking about Symfony here and generally increased skill requirements. 8.x, 9.x and early 10.x versions that are no longer supported are not that though. The entire area covers almost as much junk as the 7.x problem. And that is a problem today ... and has been for quite some time.

Did they forget to communicate that such a system needs an update from time to time?

The numbers always include inactive systems and also sites that are not tracked at all. I know about two of thoae myself. In one case the site is actually still online and the old customer has not responded despite being informed several times in the past. So it is still an active site. In the other case the agency is apparently just not able to take the 7.x version offline but it is no longer accessible. It is probably still included in the statistics because the cj is still running. These systems are exceptions and even if you set them very high that does not change the overall problem.

When it comes to the 7.x problems you can at least say that they are not a real problem yet. But the shit in between is definitely a problem, because all of that is no longer supported. And that's almost 280,000 installations... quite disturbing.

Anyone who uses Drupal must react. For 7.x this should have happened by the end of the year at the latest and for everything between this should have happened long ago.