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Drupal 7 Support Ends November 2023

Sara Worrell-Berg
Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Stanford Web Services continues to move full steam ahead to meet our goal of modernizing Stanford’s central web content management systems, including those websites built with the Stanford Sites Drupal 7 platform.

Drupal 7 is scheduled for end-of-life in November 2023*, which means the open-source community will no longer issue security updates for the core and contributed modules. As part of University IT’s Web Content Management program, our goal is to upgrade all Stanford-hosted Drupal 7 websites to the latest version of Drupal as soon as possible. Websites hosted on Stanford Sites Drupal 7 should be moved to the newer Stanford Sites Drupal 9 platform by June 30, 2022, or retired and deleted if necessary.

What are my hosting options?

Whether hosted on Stanford Sites or not, site owners should begin planning and moving Drupal 7 websites to the latest version of Drupal to continue receiving security updates and community support.

There are two hosting options for Drupal websites at Stanford: Stanford Sites managed CMS and Stanford’s custom hosting on Acquia.

Stanford Sites managed CMS

Stanford’s custom hosting on Acquia

This may be a good fit if you want:

  • Stanford branding
  • The latest Stanford Sites features
  • Easy-to-use editing environment
  • Regular accessibility testing
  • Stanford Web Services to manage security updates
  • Free hosting

This may be a good fit if you want:

  • Flexible theming
  • The ability to add modules of your choice
  • The option to start with Stanford’s pre-built Drupal installation profile and then extend it
  • Acquia’s add-on services, like Acquia CMS, Site Studio, or Migrate

Not sure? Submit a request for a consultation with Stanford Web Services.

Why are we making this move?

Stanford Sites, the university’s centrally managed and cloud-based Drupal platform, requires separate environments for Drupal 7 and Drupal 9+. Maintaining both versions in parallel incurs additional costs; due to funding constraints, we will continue to pursue our original timeline to retire the Drupal 7 environment (June 2022). 

Resources and Support

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

* Updated with the new end-of-life date for Drupal 7.

DISCLAIMER: UIT Blog is accurate on the publication date. We do not update information in past blog entries. We do make every effort to keep our service information pages up-to-date. Please search our service pages at uit.stanford.edu/search.