Drupal 7 Upgrade to Drupal 8

When was Drupal 8 released?

Drupal 8 was released on 19 November 2015.

Is it too early to upgrade to Drupal 8?

No. Drupal 8 is now at version 8.5.X and is the recommended Drupal distribution for any new Drupal projects. In October 2017 when Drupal 8.4.0 was released, Drupal 8 reached LTS (Long Term Support) status. This means that this version will be fully supported (for bug fixes and security fixes) for at least until 3 months after the 9.x LTS release comes out. This will give you a number of years before an upgrade to Drupal 9 needs to be considered.

It is also worth pointing out here that Drupal 9 will essentially be the same as the last Drupal 8 point release (minus deprecated code). What this means is that it is unlikely that any major architectural refactoring will be necessary between Drupal 8 and Drupal 9, thus making a core version upgrade between versions a much simpler process.

We would expect to build any new projects that we are involved with now with Drupal 8 unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Is it a big job to upgrade to Drupal 8?

It depends. The upgrade process is much more straightforward than the upgrade process from Drupal 6 to 7, but still comes with its own challenges.

What makes Drupal 8 so special?

• Improved mobile support: You'll notice this most on the Drupal administration pages.
• Better multi-lingual support: D7 was better than D6 at handling multiple languages, but D8 takes it to the next level.
• Configuration Management: A better process for capturing the Drupal config.
• Accessibility / HTML5 / Twig: Overhaul of the front-end technologies to improve accessibility and the theming layer.
• More functional core: With more options for structuring data and rendering content.
• Usage of external libraries: That make Drupal even more powerful and flexible.
• Drupal 8 can use BigPipe technology which can result in much quicker page renderings. For uncached pages, this will yield an improved visitor experience.

How long will Drupal 8 be around for?

A long time. The time gap between the release of Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 was not far off 5 years, and if it takes a similar period between Drupal 8 and Drupal 9, then we can be assured of Drupal 7 support until well past 2020.