What path forward? The future for non-profit organizations still on Drupal 7

Presenter(s)

  • Charlotta Elizabeth Beavers
  • Eric Freedman Goldhagen

Drupal 8 was released 4 years ago (November 19 2015); there's a lot of buzz about Drupal 9
But, the vast majority of the community that uses drupal is still using Drupal 7. 

 Drupal use statistics showing number of sites using different versions of Drupal. Drupal 7 is still used by twice as many sites as Drupal 8


Especially when looking at the subset of Drupal sites that are used by Non-Profit organizations, Drupal 7 is still the most common version in use. 

With the end-of-life of Drupal 7 set for November of 2021, there is time to plan a transition before it becomes a crisis. 

But what is the best way forward? What are the options? 

We will look at the various options that exist and analyze the pros and cons of each. 

1: Drupal 8
2: Rely on long-term community/consultant based continued support for Drupal 7.    
-- similar to relying on the long-term support that has continued for Drupal 6
3: Backdrop CMS
-- Backdrop CMS is a fork of Drupal before the introduction of symphony as a dependency. It has the coding api's based in Drupal 7 and combines many of the changes that have made it into Drupal 8, such as file based configs and a better content-editing experience. 
4: non-CMS or non-Database site builders
-- there are new "static site generators" that might be less complex and more appropriate technology
-- we will only briefly touch on this area to introduce the idea and point out some examples 

This presentation will aim to leave ample time for Q & A and discussion. 

 

Who Should Attend

  • Back-end Developers
  • Content Editors
  • Decision Makers
  • Designers
  • Everyone
  • Front-end Developers
  • Project Managers
  • Site Builders
  • Sys Admins

Prerequisites

if you still use Drupal 7, this is for you