Drupal 7’s End of Life Is Coming: Avoid Risks and Upgrade to Drupal 11 with Expert Help!

Is your website still running on Drupal 7? Then, we have an important update for you. This venerable open-source veteran will stop receiving security support as of January 5, 2025. There will be no more security updates after this date. It’s time to thank Drupal 7 for making our online journey smooth and trouble-free and move on. 

Potential Risks 

So, what happens if you continue using Drupal 7 after January 5, 2025? You may have to face two types of threats: 

1. Security issues. As we’ve said, the system will no longer receive vital security updates. This may open a back door to your website for cyber criminals. They are on the constant lookout for outdated software because it’s easier to exploit. 
2. Compliance issues. If you don’t address those risks, your website may no longer meet the important compliance standards, including FedRAMP, PCI, HIPAA, SOC 2, and some others. What’s worse, this may entail serious legal consequences for you. 

What You Can Do to Mitigate Those Risks 

The most effective and far-sighted option is to migrate to one of the latest versions of the platform: Drupal 10 or Drupal 11. This gives you continuous support, access to the newest security updates, and advanced Drupal features. 

While Drupal 10 is a fantastic system, it’s slowly becoming obsolete, too. So, we recommend migrating straight to Drupal 11. Released in August, 2024, this version has several awesome enhancements that greatly facilitate content management, website building, and upgrading and maintaining Drupal applications. Let’s take a tour of the most notable ones. 

Drupal 11 Innovative Features 

Improved Authoring, Editing, and Support Using CKEditor 5

The Code Block button in the CKEditor settings now provides an option to select a programming or markup language for display (PHP, JavaScript, HTML, Python, and so on).

More Fine-Tuned Block Management 

You can now create custom blocks right under Structure in the admin panel. In addition, you can explore and roll back any revisions made to block content, work with blocks by type, and even hide or display blocks on pages depending on the returned status, such as “Success” or “Not found.” 

More Streamlined Website Administration

Site administrators will enjoy new back-end features Drupal 11 brings to the table. To begin with, Views now has a new option enabling you to create new pages that show up in the admin theme regardless of a specific path. 

Another feature that makes site administrators’ life easier is improved permission management. You can now use a handy filter to select the permissions you want to update for the current task. 

To stay up to date with the latest events and developments, new Drupal installations come equipped with an Announcement Feed module. It offers a news feed of the Drupal project, as well as important announcements from the Drupal Association in Drupal core. 

Facilitated Content Modeling and Management 

Reused text fields can now accept a strictly defined text format. The developers have also added a unified entity revision editing experience. This simplifies managing older content versions no matter where they are: in nodes, content blocks, or anywhere else. 

Another noteworthy feature is the addition of a floating bar for managing bulk operation lists. This bar allows you to perform actions on several content items you’ve selected at the same time.

Enhanced File and Media Management 

Drupal 11 offers various methods to transliterate and sanitize names of uploaded files by default. These include lowercasing, replacing whitespace, and others. 

The new version also supports revision editing for media items. Plus, in this latest edition of the platform, image sizes are by up to 34% smaller than before. This was made possible thanks to the use of WebP in the default image styles installed by Drupal core. 

These are only some of the awesome features and improvements that Drupal 11 has received so far. It would take another post to describe them all. 

But even these enhancements show that Drupal 11 is a cutting-edge platform that makes website building and content management easier than before. And this version will be actively supported and maintained by the community for at least the next couple of years. 

Assistance with Migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11

Ready to migrate from your old faithful Drupal 7 to one of the latest versions, preferably Drupal 11? Then, you should know this is not an easy feat. It’s not the same as, say, upgrading from WordPress 5 to WordPress 6. With Drupal, migration from relatively old versions essentially involves rebuilding your website. 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. When you come to think of it, migration is a perfect occasion to revise your entire website. After all these years, it may not be as modern-looking, engaging, and well-performing as it used to be. 

This is particularly important if you run your business through the website. By bringing it up to speed with the latest UI/UX trends, making it more visually appealing, fast-loading, and interactive, you improve your chances of attracting more visitors and converting them into leads and customers. 

And while the community offers a lot of valuable resources to facilitate the migration process for website owners, porting all of your content and data to the new platform safely and redeveloping the site from the ground up requires professional assistance. That’s where we come in. 

Top-Notch Drupal Migration and Development Services from GetDevDone

Our expert Drupal development team has almost two decades of experience building websites and assisting site owners with migration. Among the rest, we offer these services: 

• Custom theme development
• Theme customization
• Drupal module development
• Migration from another platform like WordPress to Drupal
• Scalability and performance optimization
• Maintenance and support

Don’t put your valuable years-worth data at risk! Reach out today and let us assist you with migrating your Drupal 7 website to Drupal 11 without losing a single bite of your precious data as well as overhauling your website for better performance and engagement.