CRITICAL EVENTS FOR D7 EOL

Drupal 7 End-of-Life — What You Need to Do When

January 5, 2025, is Drupal 7’s end-of-life deadline. It seemed so far away when the Drupal Association announced it in mid-2023. In reality, precious months are slipping away, and if you haven’t started your D7 upgrade process, this timeline infographic aims to show you how short time really is.

As you can see from the timeline above, companies that need to get off of Drupal 7 have a few things to consider, especially since this is the third end-of-life extension on the Drupal 7 platform. Here’s a breakdown of what those steps should look like.

Recognition: A Change is Coming

Drupal Association announces the final extension of D7

When a software vendor announces that they will no longer be supporting a critical piece of your company’s operational systems, that is the time to sit up and get started on looking at what that honestly means for your company.

• How does losing the support of that system open your business up to vulnerability?
• How critical is the software to your operations?

How much is it going to cost to make a change?

Immediately, you should be looking at the options of what this announcement means to your business. Can you afford to replatform? 

• If not, can you afford the risks of running end-of-life software?
• If the risk is too high, can you take on the development of any future bugs or security updates yourself?

If the answer to the two questions above is no, you have no choice but to replatform. 

What are your upgrade options?

Start looking at replacement options early. Moving through the sales process, especially if you need approval from a buying group or multiple stakeholders, takes time. Securing the budget early, or ensuring the people who write the cheques know a development project is in the preliminary stages, is critical so everyone can get their ducks in a row. 

Research: Figuring Out What Works For Everyone

Conduct stakeholder interviews

A vital step in replatforming, and one we harp on quite a bit here at Acro, is ensuring stakeholder interviews get done and everyone understands the implications of what a replatforming project means to them and their departments. Check out our Stakeholder Interview Guide if you haven’t done stakeholder interviews before.

Consult with development experts

You may have a team of expert developers in-house or not. But now is the time to start talking to web development experts to ensure there aren’t any hidden dangers lurking in your plan to replatform.

• Does your in-house team have the capacity for a big project?
• Do they have the right specialists to strategize, roadmap and develop your new solution?

If you can’t find the resources you need to answer your questions in-house, reach out to our development consultants. We are always happy to have a conversation with you and your teams.

Choosing a development partner

Even with a team of in-house developers, many enterprise organizations find partnering with a development agency for large-scale replatforming projects beneficial. Due to their expertise and familiarity with handling these projects, a web development partner like Acro with an Agile, accelerated development process can help bring a replatforming project online faster.

Planning Your New Platform

Have you ever planned a big event, like a conference? If so, you know there are so many moving pieces that it can be challenging to keep tabs on them all. This complexity is where having someone to help discover all the moving parts, strategize how you will tackle them and then roadmap what the final plan will be is of great importance.

Discovery At Acro

Our collaborative discovery process allows you to explore the best possible options for your business, guided by our digital experts. This phase is iterative, so you’re not locked into a predetermined spec list. It allows for choice and adaptability. 

We’ll guide you through several exercises and provide the tools to help you uncover all your needs, whether you know them yet or not. This phase aims to reveal all the unique insights and business requirements to match an open-source framework and your business model perfectly.

Strategy at Acro

At this phase, we take a two-pronged approach. With an understanding of your business as a whole, which we got from our discovery, we split our focus between the technical specifications and the information architecture. The brilliance of this phase is when we bring both pieces together in a visualization. It allows you to see a visual representation of your solution. This phase aims to get everyone onto the same page through information and rapid prototyping.

Roadmap at Acro

Development roadmaps are critical for transparent communication and timeline accuracy. If your team needs to introduce a sudden scope change into a project, the development roadmap clearly explains where to make that change and how it will affect other tasks within the roadmap.

To learn more, visit our Discovery & Strategy page. Note: a free download near the bottom details our exact D&S process.

Developing and Implementing Your Solution

Once you have a fully-roadmapped and detailed plan, it is time to get into the development work. Ideally, you want this phase to go quickly, which is why, at Acro, we have found a way to run the discovery and strategy portions of our process simultaneously with our development process.

As one team is building your plan and figuring out how to best set your solution up for success, our software teams are setting up environments, loading initial modules and helping configure the prototype of your site. From there, it fast-follows into development sprints, where we build your solution iteratively and quickly.

Testing and Training

Once the development phase is almost complete, it is time to start testing the software and learning how to use it. Testing and training require time and resources from your employees to understand what your new solution can do. It is also a great time to find ways to improve your processes and identify where we may be able to add any functions or features in future development sprints.

The Bottom Line: Time is Slipping Away

There are better courses of action than waiting until the eleventh hour to make any kind of plan in business. As you can see, many moving parts to changing an end-of-life software platform exist. If you need help, please contact us, no matter what stage you are in. We are happy to help, even if it is just to lend you our ear and give no-obligation advice.