Know the future of Drupal 7, 8 and 9

Drupal release update by Dries Buytaert from his blog for Drupal version 7, 8 and 9. After discussion with Drupal 7 core committers, the Drupal 8 core committers and the Drupal security team, he shared the long-term engagement of Drupal version 7, 8 and 9.

Drupal 9 will be released in 2020

Drupal 9 has to be released in 2020 as Drupal 8 comes to an end by 2021. The site owners will be given 1 year to upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

Moving from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is very easy compared to the previous major version upgrades. The contributed modules will be compatible with Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 at the same time.

Drupal 8 will be end-of-life November 2021

The end of Drupal 8 will be seen by Nov 2021.

New functionality in minor versions are seen in Drupal 8 which maintains the backward compatibility and because of this approach the release of Drupal 9 is not encouraged. This cannot happen as Drupal must be kept modern, maintainable and more secured to supported versions of 3^rd party apps.

One more biggest dependency in Drupal 8 is Symfony 3. Symfony 3 comes to an end in Nov 2021 which means that after Nov 2021, bugs in symphony 3 will not get fixed and hence Drupal 8 has to see its end by Nov 2021.

Drupal 7 will be supported until November 2021

Drupal 7 will be supported till November 2021. Drupal 7 will be updated to support newer versions of PHP and therefore the PHP team will not support the following on the respective dates:

• PHP 5.x on Dec 31^st 2018,
• PHP 7.0 on Dec 3^rd 2018,
• PHP 7.1 on 1^st Dec 2019 and
• PHP 7.2 on 30^th Nov 2020.

Conclusion Which versions of Drupal we can use?

• If you are on Drupal 7 update your PHP versions and you may to stay on it till 2021 and can go with directly on Drupal 9 later.
• If you are on Drupal 8, just keep the site up to date and get ready for Drupal 9.

Source: Blog by Dries Buytaert (Founder and project lead of Drupal): https://dri.es/drupal-7-8-and-9