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 will 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 has been indefinitely suspended until a final decision is made on the end-of-life date.

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 beyond November 2022 as new Drupal 7 core and contrib updates become available.
• 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.