Since June 2020, the Drupal project’s stated plan for the end-of-life for Drupal 7 was to end support in November 2022, and to launch a vendor-driven extended support program at that time. ITS planned to manage this transition by discontinuing regular scheduled releases of the Drupal 7 version of the UT Drupal Kit (UTDK 2), and incorporating patches from the extended support program into ad-hoc Drupal Kit releases as needed.

In February 2022, the Drupal Security Team released an updated public service announcement stating that the previously announced end-of-life date for Drupal 7 has been extended for a minimum of one year, to November 1, 2023. Additionally, the D7 end-of-life date would be re-evaluated annually from this point forward, with an announcement expected in July 2023 as to whether community support for Drupal 7 will be extended even further. In the meantime, the D7ES vendor program was indefinitely suspended until a final decision is made on the end-of-life date.

In June 2023, the Drupal Security Team released another public service announcement stating that the final end-of-life date for Drupal 7 has been extended to January 5, 2025, with no further extensions.

This announcement also includes new, specific scope changes in effect through the duration of the extended support. Most relevant for the UT Drupal Kit:

• Reduced support for moderately critical Drupal 7 issues
  • Effective August 1, 2023, the Drupal Security Team may choose to publicly post moderately critical and less critical issues affecting Drupal 7 in the public issue queue for resolution, as long as they are not mass-exploitable. 
• Drupal 7 branches of unsupported modules are no longer eligible for new maintainership
• PHP 5.5 and below will no longer be supported on Drupal 7

In response to these changes, ITS has updated the long term support plan for UTDK 2 as follows:

• Maintenance releases for UTDK 2 will continue until January 2025 as new Drupal 7 core and contrib updates become available, to the extent that it is practical for ITS to do so. Reduced support for contrib modules which are part of the UT Drupal Kit may impact the ability to keep the Kit updated and fully functioning.
• In keeping with the original plan for maintaining support under the D7ES program, these long-term maintenance releases will no longer be regularly scheduled, but will be based on the availability and impact of Drupal 7 core and contrib updates.

ITS is actively monitoring which UTDK 2-based sites are still online, and will continue to engage with site owners to ensure that timely migration plans are being developed, with a goal of fully retiring support for UTDK 2 before the actual end-of-life for Drupal 7.

ITS has developed a programmatic migration path for all of the stock components of UTDK 2, based on Drupal’s core Migrate API. Any UTDK 2 site owners interested in investigating the viability of programmatic migration should email drupal-kit-support@utlists.utexas.edu to initiate a discussion.