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Goodbye Drupal 6, Hello Drupal 9

Last month we said a sad goodbye to our last remaining Drupal 6 sites.

These were set up for Dentsply a multi-national dental supplies company who has since changed name and corporate sturucture. They remained as Drupal 6 sites owing to the changes in the company and a lack of focus to do anything with them - either upgrade or replace.

However, this has been an interesting experience as it has shown us that Drupal sites can live long after their official end of life. According to the official Drupal announcement, the EOL (end of life) should have been 24th February 2016

https://www.drupal.org/forum/general/news-and-announcements/2015-11-09/…

But, with the help of community support - and corporate backers putting code back into the system - we were able to keep these sites running and secure for another three years. We couldn't guarantee security as not all the included modules were supported and updated, but we were covered for any major vulnerabilities which arose in that three year period.

The next milestone for Drupal will be Drupal 7's end of life, set for November 2021 as outlined here:

https://dri.es/drupal-7-8-and-9

Drupal 8 will rapidly evolve into Drupal 9, meaning that upgrading to Drupal 8 will be a smart thing to do early in the process to make the transition to Drupal 9 more striaghtforward.

However, there is also the option of sticking with 7 and seeing how things go. If your site is relatively simple, it might be an option to do nothing and convert to the community contributed patch eco-system.

If you have a Drupal 7 site and are looking to upgrade to Drupal 8, drop us a line at info@turtlereality.com or give us a call on 01985 840 637 and have a chat about how we can help you.

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