![]() Risk 3: Ongoing Maintenance and SupportĪnother risk is the lack of resources to maintain your website. Over time, it will be more difficult to find developers that are willing and able to maintain an outdated version of Drupal. ![]() The second-largest risk is that any Application Programming Interface(s) (API), a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other, will stop working once out of date. For example, if a site includes a shopping cart API, the site's functionality, and business, can be dramatically impacted. Depending on the size of the site, security testing can quickly eat up a website’s budget and increases the risk of being hacked tenfold. If a website is utilizing an out-of-date version of Drupal, it will need to be frequently monitored and tested to ensure that there are no areas for exploitation. 3 Risks Associated with Delaying a Drupal Upgrade Risk 1: Securityĭrupal’s paid security team monitors the core code and makes patches to protect site security. While the move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 is a significant undertaking, it’s a great opportunity to refresh or redesign the website, reevaluate content strategy, audit site architecture, and prepare for future advancements. Overall, remaining on sunsetted versions of Drupal will be notably more expensive and burdensome for users in terms of management and updates, will be less secure, and may eventually not connect with other upgraded internet technologies. Drupal 9 offers more features and modules than previous iterations, allowing developers to more easily take advantage of the Drupal community to improve user experience and meet digital goals. Bug fixes, new modules, and security patches will be the individual’s responsibility as the Drupal community only supports the two most recent versions of the software to keep the platform moving forward. When does Drupal 7 Reach End-of-Life Status-and What Does That Mean for You?ĭrupal 7 will reach EOL in November 2022 2023, which means that the larger Drupal community will no longer support websites built on Drupal 7 (or earlier). Though websites built on the Drupal 7 can still function, it will be more challenging and far more costly to maintain due to the lack of Drupal community support. The Drupal 9 upgrade features a core code as a separate layer, which allows Drupal to make future updates more seamless and less expensive. Understanding users' upgrade concerns, especially regarding the upgrade expense, Drupal engineers began to look at platforms with layers of code, which allowed newer software versions, like Drupal 9, to have more frequent yet less intensive processes. ![]() How Drupal 9 is Different-and Better for Your Website Upgrade In the first few years after Drupal’s launch in 2001, the key Drupal community members made a fundamental software design decision not to carry legacy code forward into newer versions. In effect, the newest iterations of Drupal would not be backward compatible. This decision made it easier for the developer community to build and maintain the efficiency and flexibility of the platform over time.Ĭonsequently, this strategy made it more difficult for website owners to easily upgrade Drupal to each of the latest versions of the CMS. For example, the path from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 or 9 often requires an almost full rebuild of the code and structure because the codebase of Drupal 7 is fundamentally different than both Drupal 8 and 9, and not compatible by design. These upgrades can be expensive and prohibitive to the many firms that rely on Drupal. To better understand the importance of the Drupal 9 upgrade, it's helpful to be aware of Drupal's history and past versions. The Drupal CMS is a free, powerful, flexible, functional, and secure platform that allows organizations to build a website by selecting and adding modules. While a small team works on Drupal's core code, most of Drupal's evolution can be attributed to the worldwide community of Drupal developers who create and share the tens of thousands of modules currently available for use on the platform. Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP, a widely used programming language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |