Why Does Drupal 8 Support End Even Before Drupal 7's EOL?

Drupal Association announced the end of life (EOL) for enterprise support and development of Drupal 8. The official support window will close by the 2nd of November 2021.

Version 8 of the famed content management system was first released seven years prior in November 2015. Considering that version 7 of the CMS which had been released on 5th January 2011 is still active and is scheduled to be discontinued only by the end of next year, the early departure from the long term support of Drupal 8 came as a surprise.

Drupal Association had recently extended the EOL for Drupal 7 to the 28th of November 2022. By that time, Drupal 7 will complete 4345 days in service - a whopping 11 years, 10 months and 23 days excluding the end date.

The transition from Drupal 7 to 8 was hard. There were a lot of changes in the architecture. So webmasters regardless of their regional differences decided to continue their websites in the older version of the CMS. Compared to that, the transition from Drupal 8 to 9 was effortless. It almost rhymed with a minor release update.

Drupal 9, released on the 3rd of June 2020 is predicted to reach its EOL even faster. Since Drupal depends a lot on Symfony, an application framework written in PHP, this comes as no surprise.

Symfony 3.4, the LTS version of the framework, will reach its EOL on the 1st of November 2021. Active support for this version had ended 9 months prior. There won't be any security update after the EOL. This coincides with the EOL of Drupal 8. Incidentally, Drupal 8 is based on Symfony 3.x versions.

The current LTS version of Symfony is 4.4. The development of that version will cease by the 21st of November 2022, though it will continue to receive security updates until the 21st of November 2023. Naturally, the EOL of Drupal 9 might coincide with this date, experts say.

According to hostingtribunal.com, Drupal 7 is installed on over 619,216 live sites. That is about 66.4% of all Drupal websites. It is by far the most popular version of Drupal ever. This is why the Drupal Association extended the EOL for Drupal 7 to next year although Drupal 8 support will end this year-end. It will give ample time for the developers to move from their Drupal 7 installations directly to Drupal 9 skipping a version in between.

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