Drupal 7’s End of Life and What That Means for Stanford Sites

The Drupal 7 (D7) community recently announced that due to the COVID-19 impact, they are extending the previously scheduled D7 end of life from November 2021 to November 2022. 

How does this affect our goal to upgrade all D7 Stanford websites to Drupal 8 in the next year or so? Good question! 

For Stanford Sites, the university’s centrally-managed Drupal platform, the answer has to do with the cost of our hosting infrastructure. Stanford Sites requires separate environments for D7 and D8, which increases our costs when we maintain both versions in parallel. Because of funding constraints, we will continue to pursue our original timeline to retire the D7 environment. 

This means that we’re still moving full-steam ahead towards our November 2021 target, and we need your help to get there! If you have a group or department D7 website on Stanford Sites, now is a good time to plan a move to D8 and claim a new website. 

What about Drupal sites on AFS?

If you own or manage a D7 website that is on AFS, you have options. We strongly urge you to delete any inactive sites, or move to the new Stanford Sites D8 platform. Hosting is free and faster on Stanford Sites, and any sites built on our D8 product will automatically be upgraded to D9+ later. 

If Stanford Sites is not the right fit for your website, you can still move your website off AFS and experience greater performance with custom Drupal hosting on Acquia. 

What’s currently on Stanford Sites Drupal 8?

We understand that rebuilding your D7 website is no easy task, and we’re here to help. Our team is diligently working to give you a quality D8 product that evolves into a more widely-usable, feature-rich version every month.

As of this month, Stanford Sites v1.3.0 is packed full of goodies that are already being used in over 130 D8 websites — yes, you heard that right — 130 websites built on D8 since we launched in February. A few major features and enhancements include:

• Person/People Lists + CAP integration. Easily present, organize, and categorize a listing of people in your organization through the Person content type (released in v1.2.0). Now integrated with CAP, you can pull the directory information that is displayed on faculty and staff CAP profiles (profiles.stanford.edu). 
• Events. Build and present events with detailed schedule information, including sessions dates/times, headline, description, location, speaker details, and more. Events Series allows you to organize and display your events into collections so that you can easily promote listings of related events to your audiences. Additionally, you can import events directly from events.stanford.edu. 
• News for Stanford Sites. Create News articles, organize content by taxonomy terms, and display news articles on the dynamic News List page.
• Multiple items in a row. Put multiple Paragraph types in a row, to easily create beautiful and unique page layouts.
• Google Forms. Embed Google Forms into a webpage (timely with the announcement of Google Forms replacing Form Builder)

Our Drupal 8 adoption guide offers tools, training, and resources to support your website transition — we can even help you budget your rebuild! 

If you have questions or concerns about what’s next for your Drupal 7 website, please let us know. 

Learn more

Visit our Drupal Projects webpage for more information about these projects.